Sensing Water: Uncovering Health and Well-Being in the Sea and Surf

Abstract

This article considers how different recreational users engage with and utilize blue spaces as health-enabling. Informed by empirical and participatory fieldwork with surfing and sea swimming groups, we explore embodied and emotional experiences while researching directly within blue space. Given a focus on health and well-being, we identify different dimensions of how surfers and swimmers narrate those experiences while directly immersed in water during a sport/recreational activity. Such questions resonate with geographical thinking around phenomenology, active relational geographies, embodiment, emotion, and sport and leisure practice. We use a broad health promotion or enabling spaces approach to capture different emotional and embodied accounts of immersions in blue space, recognizing that this capture is emergent in and from place.