By Scott Graber
It is Wednesday, June 3, and I’m at The Sands Beach in Port Royal.
For most of my life I’ve been a swimmer.
As a boy I spent my childhood summers dodging and diving into the waves at Ocean Drive Beach, S.C. When I was 15, I joined a swim team at Ft. Sam Houston, Texas; then swam at The Citadel; and then spent 20 years swimming for Dick Fetters on the Beaufort Masters Swim Team.
Though I love crystalline-clear, chlorine scented lap-swimming, my real romance is swimming “in the river.” In the beginning that was swimming off the beach at Land’s End; off a dock on Battery Creek; then at the “Sands” in Port Royal.
I love the opacity, the alternative patches of cold and warm water, the sense (early in the morning) that one is partly submerged in a vast, primordial, life-filled bowl of Bouillabaisse. I also have two fellow swimmers — Lynn Strange and Lynn Selden — who share this same passion.
Lately we read troublesome reports about a microbe — Vibrio vulnificus — that also shares these waters and, importantly, sometimes enters the human body when that body is bleeding; or when one ingests uncooked seafood. When there is a wound we hear reports of dramatic surgery to remove necrotic flesh that has been invaded by this “flesh eating” bacteria. (June 1, 2026 edition of the New Yorker Magazine.)
It seems that Vibrio likes to be where the water is warm — 59 degrees Fahrenheit being a threshold. Apparently it’s population “soars” at 77 degrees and above. It also appears this pathogen is moving up the Eastern Coast and has been reported as far north as Massachusetts.
“Nowadays, about a dozen cases are confirmed in Maryland each year… A 2023 study found that the season in which the bacteria are detectable now starts in early spring and extends into the fall.” (New Yorker)
My “open water” swimming usually begins in mid-March when the local waters are well-below 77 degrees. Sometimes the water seems so cold that my swim is more like a therapeutic “cold plunge”. Sometimes I worry about the tide — a “rip current” — and once I was “bumped” by a shark of the “bump and run” variety as opposed to the “bump and bite” species.
I really should be focused on salinity because studies around Georgetown show a correlation between salinity and Vibrio. But I enter the water thinking about Gaza, Vladimir Putin, or the fact that I’ve failed to rotate the tires on my Honda Fit. After 10 minutes of swimming freestyle I usually roll over on my back and watch the dark, low-flying clouds scudding over Parris Island on their way, I suppose, to the Gulf Stream.
But the New Yorker piece had an impact on me — you must know that I am my father’s son — and he schooled me on the fact that the great majority of life on this planet is viral, bacterial, fungal and, sometimes, opportunistic in movement from one host to the next.
Autoclaves effectively kill bacteria at 250 degrees; and our natural body heat (98 degrees) kills most fungus and many other microbes that come our way. But the New Yorker points out that the climate is changing, getting hotter, and microbes — fungi in particular — are mutating.
“In a 2019 research paper, Casadevall predicted that climate change would encourage fungi to adapt to warming giving them new opportunities to infect humans. Months before his paper was published a woman at the Tokyo Metropolitan Medical Center came down with a stubborn and unfamiliar infection. When doctors swabbed her ears they found an unknown fungus they dubbed Candida auras. (Auris is latin for ear.) The fungus had no problem growing at a hundred and four degrees.”
Sometimes when swimming I wonder about “Jaws” and the people who stopped swimming in the ocean after that movie came out in 1975.
“A widely noted study on galeophobia (fear of sharks) revealed that a massive majority of audiences were affected, with some individuals completely avoiding ocean swimming for years after viewing the film.” (Google, AI)
Notwithstanding the fact there are only 64 unprovoked, worldwide shark bites reported annually, 9% being fatal; most adults that I see from my perch are sitting on lawn chairs, well oiled, recumbent.
We all take chances, every day, and one should read the New Yorker piece as well as the Winyah Bay (Georgetown) Study. But I’m still drawn to my daily swim, my riverine renewal, my microbiotic baptism in these wine-dark waters.
Scott Graber is a lawyer, novelist, veteran columnist and longtime resident of Port Royal. He can be reached at cscottgraber@gmail.com.