Rochester: ‘Sea pools’ can help to teach more people how to swim
Published:Saturday | December 23, 2023 | 12:08 AMLivingston Scott/Gleaner Writer
New Aquatic Sports Association of Jamaica (ASAJ) president, Lance Rochester, wants to spread swimming to a wider cross-section of Jamaicans and one of his planned methods to achieve this is to develop a concept known as a ‘sea pool’.
Rochester pointed out that the massive expense required to build a pool and their limited availability to the public locally makes it difficult to teach the average Jamaican how to swim.
However, Jamaica is blessed with an abundance of beaches, and he believes they can utilise this resource to accomplish their ambition of spreading the sport.
“Pools are very expensive but there is a concept called the ‘sea pool’, where we define as an area in any calm body of water. It can be a beach, it can be a harbour, it can be a bay or a lake.
“You can build a pool there and it is low maintenance. You can use floated bulkheads to define the area and you can put lanes as well,” he explained.
“So there are cheaper ways for building pools. Obviously, it will not be the Olympic type of pool but we can build pools inland and use various types of bodies of water in such a way that they can facilitate swimming lessons.”
There are ten pools available to the public locally, eight of which are situated in Kingston and St Andrew and one each in Montego Bay and Portmore.
Rochester admitted it will not be easy to establish sea pools; however, he hopes that by the end of his tenure the concept will begin to become popular.
“It will be difficult and we will not have it the way we want at the end of this two-year term, but we will be laying a framework and you should soon start seeing some results.
“When you are driving along the coastline you will see an area that looks like a pool and you will see people learning to swim, when you start to see those dotting up around the country then you can say we are achieving some degree of success,” Rochester said.