Goslings Swimmers
The London gay swimming group Goslings, which has been operating a weekly swim at the Oasis heated outdoor pool, Covent Garden, for over 30 years, and has been an Associated Club of GOC for some time, joins up fully as a Specialist Group within GOC starting from February 2012. About a third of regular Goslings are existing GOC members already, and full integration will be mutually beneficial. Goslings' GOC coordinator is to be Jeremy, mainly West Kent GOC; and Olawale, mainly Sussex GOC, is also on the new Goslings committee. Several of the other Goslings will also be well-known to wider GOC from past AOGs.
Details of our weekly swim are now on our events page, and will also be listed in Out & About. As the spring weather arrives, why not dig out your cozzie and join us one Thursday evening ? For the GOC members' rate, remember to bring your GOC membership certificate.
We also have occasional social events. Our New Year dinner at a Covent Garden restaurant was successful, and we may do something jolly in the summer. Many of the Goslings also adjourn to the pub after the weekly swim.
Answers below to some other questions we're often asked :
We are non-competitive, and all levels of swimming ability are welcome, but Goslings does not provide swimming tuition.
The regular Goslings are (like GOC as a whole) predominantly gay male but women are equally welcome. Goslings have private hire of the pool for our session. Non-members of GOC can swim with us occasionally but must pay a higher rate, and after three swims should join GOC. We quite often have straight visitors who didn't realise that the pool closes to the public early that evening - we're happy to let them swim (at the higher rate) if they're relaxed about a gay swimming club.We often have two or three such visitors.
The pool has fast, medium and slow lanes - take your pick. In each lane people are swimming up and down, and there's often a chatty gathering at the shallow end ( where the warmer water comes in ). But the session is really for lane swimming, so unless there are very few people it's not practical just to splash around.
We do operate through the year, though numbers dip in winter and rise in summer. The pool really is outdoors, but is reasonably heated.
