E41 - Safeswim - a users guide for Open Water Swimmers.

Today we’re diving into a fantastic tool designed to help everyday Kiwis enjoy our beautiful beaches more safely - Safeswim. 

Safeswim has had some bad press within the Open Water Swimming Community, but when you remember that it was built for the general public — families, casual swimmers, and anyone heading to the beach — giving clear, accessible information so you can make safe and confident decisions before getting in the water, it starts making more sense. 

The platform is constantly learning and evolving, and now it’s even better thanks to its partnership with Surf Life Saving New Zealand. This means more accurate and timely updates, plus an improved understanding of local conditions. One of the most valuable features is that it doesn’t just tell you if the water looks good — it gives you a list of real-time hazards at specific beaches, from strong currents to pollution alerts, helping you avoid surprises and stay safe.

Great tool, getting better and better. 

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to another Clevitics podcast. In this podcast we're talking to the people behind Saeswim. Saeswim is an Auckland Council initiative that tries to tell people about Saeswiming in open water. The people we're talking to is Holly Foreman, who's the driver behind it at Council and Martin Neal, who's the chief science officer that helps put it all together. We talk about how the whole system got started and how it evolves over time. It's not just a council thing, we talk about the partnerships they have with surf lifesaving and also water care. We talk about what it means to people who are involved in open water swimming as opposed to just beach bathers and also a little bit of hints as to how swimmers can engage with them. I think this is going to be pretty interesting. I know it is a bit triggering for some people around the Auckland region, but it's good to hear the backstory of it. Here we go, enjoy it. Welcome to another Clevitics podcast. In this podcast we're talking about Saeswim to Holly and Martin. Welcome, Holly and Martin. Good morning. Cool. So it's a bit different during normal ones. Normally we just go and ask somebody for their swim story, but obviously that's not really the case. But maybe you can just give us maybe the story of swim safe sort of how it started and how it's evolved and you can sort of explain the why it actually exists and then we can go into the how it works and we can sort of have a conversation from there. So over to you guys. I think you're not stuck. That's a lot of armpit, but yeah well really excited to be here. Saeswim journey for me has been around about six years. I've been working on the programme and managed a swim for the last three. Super proud of the privacy part of this programme and when I was giving the chance I thought I'd just jump at it. And I guess that's a little bit about me and Martin too, just wanted to help you. Yeah so I'm a biomedical scientist. I've been working on Saeswim in the current version since it started. I remember talking to you about a gym back in 2017 when we developed the new programme. In a previous job I'd seen Saeswim data that come across my desk from time to time, but I never had any sort of meaningful involvement until 2017. And that's a great place to stop. Saeswim has been around for a long time, way before 2017, for about 20 years, but the version that you know, the website now and app is 2017 and probably hand over to Martin because Martin was one of the creases of the new version. Yeah sure so I mean the lovely says the programme had run basically going out and taking weekly samples once a week during summer, putting those sample results on a council webpage and through the work we did at the time, nobody really knew much about it, and we're relatively low profile. So the whole point of it was really to make sure that people around Auckland knew when the water quality was good enough and that you could go to safely swim, that you weren't going to get your little kids crook or something while taking down to the water when there was no overflow, right? Yeah I mean that's the whole concept of these recreation and water quality programmes, it's about giving people information about what's the likely health risk from swimming at any particular time. The old monitoring approach that we used to do had been around for 20 or 30 years and that was probably the best available techniques we had back up back in the day. There was a catalyst for change, which was the Havillock and North Drinking Water incident in 2016 I think it was, and at that time it was the managers of the section programme, the senior managers saw a potential risk in the way the section programme was operated, and that's because I know Havillock and North is drinking water and safe swim is recreational water but the underlying technical issues are the same where if you take a sample of those two things and send them off to the lab to tell you whether the water is good enough to drink or good enough to swim in, you don't get it result for two days, so Havillock and North was when people were drinking a pleasant water for two days, they got a test back and then the first response to that test is no need to do a retest, so then you went another 48 hours before you actually do anything and so the same was swimming, so the risk is you're always giving people out of day information. Yeah, so the senior managers back in 2017 recognised that it was a risk and they commissioned a review which looked around the world to say what's the best way that this has been done and managed around the world and so essentially as part of that review we looked at examples of recreational programmes in Australia, in Hong Kong, in Europe, in America and essentially we cherry-picked all of the good bits of those programmes and put them together in safe swim and then added a whole lot of local rather than factors that were important to people swimming in and around Auckland. Oh, that's really cool. Yeah, they haven't been still worked with those other programmes, still like to gather, looked at a vein, keep talking to see how we can grow and collaborate together and so I think hopefully all the listeners know what the source of this, but as you said before it enables you to jump online and see when away you can swim, see what more source of information, water safety information, water temperature, tides and it's not just real time now you can look to three days in advance and you can plan because there's a heading into the weekend where when you want to swim and so the new programme in 2017 went from that kind of hidden information of old, subald results to now the real time order to be protected. I'm so off to you. So what you're doing at the moment is you're still doing sampling and monitoring. Absolutely. That's the problem, right? Very question. That's still happening, but you're putting it into a computer system and it's modeling based on historical information and the tests that you're doing and weather and tides and everything else. And that's how you can forecast things going up for three days, is that correct? And so maybe we can expand a little bit. So start with the sampling. How often and how does that look? It's good to go back to your earlier point marks on that pre-2017. As Cheti, Cheti, a friend of mine, we were at on the water between Tury-Tury and Wahiki on the weekend and I mentioned how I'm going to go and meet these two legends and that's what I'm saying. And he was like, did I say something? He said something. I was really not very good. And he came remember back in the day a helicopter would arrive like once a season or three months or so. He'd come down and scoop up a whole mental water and fly off to the next beat. So I mean, I'm guessing that's the heritage or the background of that. That was part of the service. So there's a couple of things tied up. So there's in general taking a sample once a week. So if you're going out once a week and it's a day like today, so we're looking at it's a beautiful blue sky. We're going to go and take a sample and I'd be guaranteeing 99% of the samples we take from beaches today would be below the swimming guideline. Below this one? Yes, so okay. Swimming. Gotcha. That'd be good. That's the concentration bacteria in the water is what we're measuring. And if it goes above a particular number, then it's above the guideline and we say it's not suitable for swimming or it's high risk and below the guideline is low risk. So if we go out every week in conditions like this and we're just saying, well, all we're saying is when it's not raining, water quality is okay. Well, it's time to explain to me. Yeah, so that was that's the fundamental basis of the monitoring approach. Auckland had a little bit of a special application where yes, samples were taken by helicopter from some beaches. Now that had a really good efficiency element to it because it meant you could sample 30 to 40 beaches in a day that you would never be able to do if you drove around to the mall. The problem was for health and safety reasons that helicopter can come right into the shore where people are swimming. So they're taking water in quite deep water, which I'm sure we'll come to later on. We know when you get the deep, the further you get away from the beach, deeper water, the better the water quality is going to be. So you're not only generating data on a sunny day like this, you're generating it probably in the wrong place. So swimming guidelines we work to and the studies of health risk have all been done in the surf zone and ideally we're going down more taking samples out about knee depth as a broad cluster routine place where the more samples are taken. And we're looking for in beaches, we're looking for a thing called enterococci, which indicates the presence of fecal material, which enterococci generally won't make you sick, but the presence of fecal material is inferred to be that there will be pathogens in all the viruses and other bacteria that potentially can make you sick. So how do you click those samples currently? Currently we've got a team I'm going to hope yeah we've got a team of samplers for the council and we also use contractors as I'm unneeded and they are out in the summer well pretty much every day throughout the throughout the year. Yeah come rather shine but throughout one main program we're actually chasing a lot of wet weather so you know that it looks like the best job in the world which is to get to go visit all our beaches some of the other places. We want to get them out there which doesn't retract this. I mean it's been a wonderful summer and it hasn't rained for a while but I mean so they go out and there's something in knee deep water and it's done quite rough now that's the key point and they drive to the beaches and we wait out because another helicopter has some efficiency in the games it doesn't give us the data we need in terms of comparing with the health risk. So you see it by drone. No no no. I was going to say come we've got to have some coolers. Yeah it wasn't a little bit of a good thing. Yeah it didn't work very well. Yeah um but I've got a question about feet and matter. Sure so in my mind being mind I have a little brain I'm not a scientist. It's wickedly um when it rains a lot a lot of the overflow from the streets so rainwater flows into the drains or gutters as we call them in South Africa. Yeah and that flows into the ocean. So where does the fecal matter come from? So you know you know because obviously you know most everybody's you know going to the new on the street. I get that every bit dirty but I don't understand the feet and matter. So one of the things we do now in addition and this is a relatively recent in terms of the last of the 10 years where it's become a practical thing you can do as we can actually do additional analysis beyond the fake and indicated bacteria which is what we call host specific bacteria so we have bacteria in our sacks that other organisms sorry in our organisations does that have same with and the common things we test for are dogs, birds and remnants. Yeah. So sheep and beef. Gotcha. So in an environment where you have even if you had no humans no waste of water we would still expect you to see bird poo, possum poo, cat poo, dog poo. Gotcha and those types of poo still carry pathogens like birds for example can't pilot back to someone other two of the big ones that we that we see. Okay. So yes human waste of water is or human fickle is part of the picture but it's not the only part of the picture. Good chances to go on from Duncan. So you would get human fickle matter if you had a really strong dark poor and you overloaded the the system or you've got links between the seary system and the waste water system is is that what happened? It can happen. It can happen. Well the I mean some of the network here the waste water and storm to network is separate. Yeah. The older parts of the city that combined and so you get a lot of rain, the overwhelming and then you get the overflows out and you do the overflows so that to stop them backing up and going into your house through the toilet they spin out different places and when they spin out some of that dry is water but also house of waste but also human waste. So it's when it's really really rain hard that that we've got that risk. No if you just spin a little bit of rain. It depends on the location. It depends on the location and the other thing is obviously in urban built up area we have waste water networks. Once we get into the rural areas we have septic tanks and it's really important that those are maintained as well. We've got places in the sexual program where we see human fickle contamination at beaches and there is no waste water network. It's just coming from septic tanks which can be old, can you probably read it? It's an old type of thing. So it's a complicated picture actually. I suppose you go to all the cars we need the witsuits as well. I think somebody was talking about how it includes you to go on the ocean swimmer. Yes, that would be a problem for us. I'm maybe jumping ahead but when you detect or sample bad water, I don't know if there's a proper tune for it but bad water, not in some of the water. How long does it take for that to go from black back to green? Is it just like a tar change or? It's a good question. Yeah. Do you want to listen to many? Well, I can use that one. Yeah, so I guess what you're talking about there is the recovery after a lot of water quality contamination. It's probably important just to talk about the impact at the start as well. So location speeches, whatever we call them, where people go swimming. Everything is sort of sort of specific. So there's a sort of, for each location, the relationship we have with water quality is specific to that location. So some beaches are more sensitive than others. So we know you've probably heard of the Central Interceptor, which is aiming to deal with some of the combined network down here. We know down here a couple of miles of rain and that network overflows. On the other end of the scale, we've got beaches that say somewhere like Tafranari, where we've been sampling there for 20 years and never detected pool water quality. Okay. So we've got everything from, if there's a cloud in the sky, it might be a bit dodgy to swim there. There could be a, almost hurricane, that cycling everywhere, we were doing something after that and we didn't see an issue. Okay. So there's different beaches, different. Yeah. And then on the recap. So if we do them see an impact at a beach, then also the recovery is specific, big specific. So open coast sites might be like, say, one type of cycle, great quicks, flushing. We know that in a harvest sites, and we've got a model that helps us visualize this, the sort of, the contamination comes in and it sort of sloshes around for a few days. I maybe need three or four type cycles to catch it. So flushing. So certainly two, they're more different. Yeah, yeah. So yeah, so that the impact is different, can be different, matter of terrain or whatever. And then the recovery is different matter time. And I think that's a very important point because often we're asked, well, why is my beach green and the beach next to me is red? And it's because it's site-specific, the model is a specific case for that beach. Yeah. If we think about, you know, we talked about just now that land, that the rain, the fog on the land, and washing stuff in, you know, if you think about a beach that may has lots of pot, this charge is an extreme going to that beach. And then next one is an enclosed bay with no discharges. You know, the likely risk of contamination of those two places is quite different. Yes. And we'd like to likely to see poor and inequality at the one with the whole of the discharges. Because that's just where the source of the contamination is. So one of the questions that we often get is, is there a sort of noticeable difference in quality between the inner harbour and in the harrekie gulf? Because quite a few people are swimmers, they don't just swim in the inner harbour. It's not as clean or something. I was just wondering from your point of view whether there's a kind of noticeable difference. Yeah, taking into account that, yeah, it might take longer for things to settle down in the inner harbour, is it is it betrothless or no different really in a harbour to the harrekie gulf? I'm giving away the best beach secrets. I think it depends, honestly, it depends where. Yeah. I think I don't think you can blanket that whole statement. But Martin, what's your would you agree with that? Yeah, I think it's not a hard one, fast one. You know, some of the inner harbocytes around the whole of parts of the city that we've mentioned already. Yeah, potentially have poor water quality, but we know there are two places on one hikki that I've got permanent red water quality warnings at the moment because there's local issues out there. So it's, you know, it's got a blanket set. Yeah, that's why I so called to check every day. And the problem is, they're really localized impacts that only affect one small place. We've even got good places. I'm great there right now until we're looking at water quality issues. You know, you would think that an island out there with all of that harrekie gulf, flashing around it should be okay, but sometimes you get those really sort of localised impacts that cause the stuff. Yeah, yeah. The failing septic tank over there, or you could have a an illegal connection, a very localized illegal connection and a beautiful beach that is actually causing contamination that we are unable to find where it's coming from. So it's, it swings around about. So by a legal connection, somebody is just linked to sewage directly into a wastewater, into a stormwater system. So it's just flowing out untreated in that spot. Yeah, yeah, illegal. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, if we think about the swimming guidelines, so we've got a suitable size and bottle here, but if we imagine this was about 100 mils, the swimming guidelines we're looking for is 280. So 280 bacteria in a bottle of that size would put us over the limit. Each gram of poo has about 15 million. So you can see it doesn't take a, doesn't take a lot of poo to impact water quality in certain places. So then if you've got, you know, septic tank that's been used by an extended family or something like that, you could end up having quality. Yeah, probably in fact, yeah. How big is your team? Well, probably, well, there's tons of samples out and about. We've got six internal council swimming team and not just all sorts of something, but other water quality projects. Safe swim, um, um, haven't stopped myself. And then we're lots of, um, independent vises. Intractive. As I've been required. Gotcha. Yeah. And last time I've been working on the program since when I was 17, when I started. And just I was just going to say I was looking at it to the ocean before we were talking. And although we were focusing on the talking about code and all the bad stuff. Yeah. I think, and there obviously are big issues when it's raining. I think sometimes we forget there's actually quite a lot of places are good. And Auckland, we're really lucky with the incredible beaches. And the good water quality, many of them, and it's really easy to focus on. Oh, I'm doing it. I'm so lucky because I think we've got about 145 sites on the safe swim. And we've got a monitor and sample about 50 others. Hopefully gathered a day to try and make them a safe swim in the future. Always there's a suggestion. It's the hope that we've got those sites that you know, people swim out. They're continually changing and building the program. So Holly, you're 100% correct. We are very spoiled because when it's raining or when it's windy or whatever the case might be, we'll, we'll, you know, pull out safe swim or weather report and we'll just find another beach that we can go to if I like a beach is not available. So definitely it's heading ready to us from that perspective. But so 145 locations, you say? Yeah, and within Auckland. Auckland's obviously Northland is now a system. Yes. And so there's about 80, say some sites in Northland. And then across Altyano, it's also self-life settings platform to communicate lifeguard. But try it. Gotcha. I was going to ask a lot of people to serve life. So if you want to talk to that, that's a great sort of collaboration. I think I have a little part to play. Yeah, well, I came along and people said, oh, well, you know, you can say that it's safe to sort of be hard. I said, yeah, and you might say that, you know, there's not many bugs in the water but there's five meter surf coming here. You might want to take that on board. So how's the partnership? Is it it's a partnership you'd call it with with surf life saving or how does that relationship work? Yeah, I mean, yeah, I remember back in I think it was back in 2017, Jim, when we first talked about that and you you recommended and introduced us to Matt and Adam, who were the chief executive and chief operations of surf life saving north region as it was at the time. Yep. And we had the same same concerns. If you go back to the original review that was done, it talked about the fact that beach safety is not just about water quality. In fact, you know, a lot of the immediate risks of the beach are not water quality related, but the water quality is more of a longer time thing. Yep. And it does get a little bit underplayed because quite often the incubation period between going for swimming and getting sick might be a week or even slightly more. And so you don't tend to associate it with the swimming activity, whereas, you know, if you have a physical safety issue at a beach and you get smacked out of our wave or hit by something or, you know, near-drapping, that is an immediate thing there, there are presence. But yeah, so I remember the first time I went to Cansey, Adam and Matt and they were sort of nearly follow up their chair when we said the capsule had a webpage and they said beaches were safe based on water quality information. And basically, you need nothing about it and we're astounded. But, you know, we talked to them, we got them on board, and we worked together to design the first version of Sofson's back in 2017. And at the sense of the time, we also talked to a few user groups, which included the notion swimming group and got some feedback on what they'd like to see. So the idea was to try to bring as many of these things, many of these bits of information together in the same place. And Holly's been leading that partnership since, I think, probably has more information than me around what's going on at the moment and how it's working with them. Thank you, Mr. Epstein. It's a really wonderful collaboration with Sof. They're fantastic and it's a great addition to have water quality and water safety, and then to, you know, be able to jump on and find out when the lifeguards are patrolling. And they said that teams out on the beach, they have put a petrol app, and they use it for all their kind of ass-imagined and their day-to-day lifeguards patrolling, but they also have a link to Sofson. So if they're looking at, you know, the strong currents on shore winds, sharks, they're the theme of the year. They will embed into the app, and that links through to Sofson. So it's real time. That's a very good slide. Yeah, and they, when they're on patrol, they'll update it. So, you know, they change up at trial times from 10 to 9 if it's busy or extended during the day. And so that's across the country. And so that's absolutely awesome. And they also are in charge of carrot hazard assessments. Before a site goes on to Saeswim, they'll go and carrot hazard assessments, so that information within the about beach section on Saeswim has to show you some different hazards. Tell you if there's a bad rock, or a reef, or something like that. That's sort of stuff. And so they'll do that, and then they'll also have the real time as well. So how can Saeswim stop 13-year-olds on Jetski's acting like lunatics? I don't know anyone. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's, that's beyond... You can talk to the harlaners about that one. Yeah. And we're, so the surf live-saving, and there's Tefata Aura. And so the kind of the environment of health, the vice-the-J fish, or the seabed as eruption, or the toxic algae that we're seeing in around the region this year. We work really closely with the environmental health teams in council and Tefata Aura to work out. And, you know, they improve the messaging, they're in charge of that side of Saeswim. And surf live-saving again, they have their own access to Saeswim, but they communicate their life-saving information. And then drown in prevention as a partner. Norfund, now they're on board, and Boerzekef. And I know we've talked about wigswigs over there for some stage, or even now, we've talked about blackins, and the integration we have with sensors on the network. Again, real-time information. When there is a waste water overflow at a site that we have sensors that's connected to one of our Saeswim sites, that will turn that sensor information, because it's the back end of Saeswim, is pushed up to the website and showing that real-time waste water overflow, which results in a black pin. And as you'll see, you might have noticed the difference over the last couple of years on the pin, which now looks like a, I guess, a ZTA type, if the status of the little pin on the side. Investigating or completes. And there's a whole team of water care that look after that. And so it's not just the automatic sensor information that we have integrated with Saeswim, but there's a team that if engineers or the public have notified there's a blockage of the main way that an impact and overflow into the beach, even when it's not raining, they'll override the system and turn the pin black to communicate that they know that there's a waste water overflow. And that's been such a growing collaboration and hats off to water care to communicate that information. Yes. CleverDex is New Zealand's largest swim-focused podcast. And our team at Swimscapes is proud to be their official partner with all things swimming. Swimscapes offers both piloting and safety for solar marathon swims, as well as various packages including marathon relay swims, swim camps, and swim adventure holidays. Swimscapes is also a facilitator of the Auckland Triple Crown coming soon. Probably brought to you by Swimscapes. So I don't know, but I'm just thinking, you know, the website is awesome and we've all seen it. Do you have in play what's thinking about sort of preemptive notifications? You know, so you might have a swim group that always goes out of Brown's Bay and you notice that it's water quality read that you start sending emails or something. Is that something that's being thought of considered? Oh, holy smiling sight. Yes, that's a story. Oh, right smile. Absolutely because we launched our app this year. Say, you know, cheeky plug if you enjoyed our app on Go On To App Store and download it. For now, it's now, I think the functionality this year is exploring how we can use notifications and how we can land it correctly. You don't want to oversaturate the market and send thousands out to you. Or the price will be exactly the same. It's working with people like yourself to try and work out what would be useful. And then I think that's something we're going to research over winter to see how we can maybe do a couple of pilots next year and then we start with safety notifications. If we knew potentially that there's many places on the west coast with terrible conditions, how could you wrap that up in a notification which throws out to the users so that people know before they're driven out to the west coast to go swimming? Because we know once you tend to get to a place you're going to go swimming. So we'd save some you want to try and get people to check before they make a decision to get in the car, drive somewhere, and then ultimately spend this about the heavy change. That's a great, if you've got an idea, happy to receive suggestions. We're absolutely we're stepping through to try and understand the best way to land that with you. So the one thought because I come from IT, so I've got a bit of a techie background. Perfect. I don't know whether you have it, but having some sort of an API or something so that other technical people can go along and make the queries and kind of do it on their own. So one of the groups I'm part of is Beta Bay, which works out sort of the Marini kind of area, and they've got a couple of techie guys with their own little website. Well, so I don't know whether it's working at the moment or whether it should, what's that? What's an API? It's an application programming interface. It's a way of one computer talking to another computer. So if you've got a website, you could go and query that. And then once you've got the data, you know, you could do it. So it's what Mike does all day. I'm sad you guys. I was so much done in the end there. So yes, I mean, yes, it's possible. So when we push or we have an API where other places can access the query to the session data, and apparently we made some changes this summer and inadvertently changed one of the APIs. And so there was a electronic group and maybe the same thing. Yeah, I think it might be. We're using it and we're, you know, the tech team, but for going on, it's set that up for years ago, or whatever it was, you know. So it's theoretically possible, of course, yes. So I just think that that would be a useful thing. And then, you know, groups can do their own stuff with it as well as everything else. It's just another two and two locks. One of the things we tried for a year or two at the beginning, because there was some of the ocean, some events was where we had some TV problems at the start, but we also had an event pen that would pop up, you know, 24 hours before, say there was an event coming up here and then the event overall organizer can put information on it. It's sort of hung around for a year or two, but the guy we used to work with moved on and started doing something and then, you know, it just sort of drifted a little bit. But there was that functionality and we used to have this icon, that would pop up up there for the tech community series. Yeah. There was another one I forget what the other one was. And I mean, even this week, we're working closely with the weak bits, kids triathlon, which is this weekend. Yeah, yeah. So we'll be going out and I've already talked to you a little bit about the problems with sampling. So we've got it. We're going to have to sample that location at the last possible minute, so that we can get the sample back to the lab, process it and give them a result before they make decision whether to, and even then things could change in that period, but we're just trying to support them as best we can for that particular event. And because it's obviously, it's a kids event and we have the profile and that, so that they want to do everything they can to be seen. So the right thing. Two questions, well, two points. So the first one, maybe we'll come back to, but I guess the question is, who is the target audience? Because it's actually not, I hope, more or less or less. So I think I just want to touch on what we read from that site versus what mom and her two toddlers are going to read from the site. They're going to get two very different things. And then to go back to the event scenario, I think it's very valid, right? Because there's a lot of guys out there that are not taking the site as gospel. And there was a scenario, probably lost you if you're a call at a echoer, cross switch. Oh, yeah. You're a call. There was a lot of this, yeah, yeah. And so maybe just background for the listeners, basically, there was a swim race. All the swimmers had, you know, put their flats in their competition, events, organizers had set up shop and everything was good to go. I don't know the full details, but somebody sort of said, hang us, what's the quality issue? And there was a debacle, is there, isn't there? Apparently, the water sample that they were looking at was a little older, it was a couple of days or a week old. Last I showed the swimmers still cancelled, whereas potentially if you could get the weak kick scenario off the ground, and maybe we can help with that. I can put you in touch with some of those guys that run all of those events. I'm pretty sure that we need very eager to work with you because it's in everybody's interest. But that one was a bit more than you loved. Yes, a lot of unhappy campers agree. Yes, and while I can't talk to that specific one, I think it's a really important point to say, it's all about giving the best available information to the user. We do have those features, and we've given advice. So, do you want to go with those information guys? That's effectively what it is. Though through events and council events, teams and licensing, I know different obligations do. Well, it's a health and safety thing if you can't put your staff into a situation that might be hazardous. So that kind of constrains the event team, but everything else is just information for people to take with and do what they want. That was kind of what it was. This love seemed to be dead. You can't tell it's a torture to you. You can't tell it's a torture to you. You can't tell it's a torture to you. You know, it's a very different thing. They can ignore you. Showing my risk on the website, it's swimming as it applies, but it's up to you. And with ways to auto-flose, they can fund to excite different approach. And it's, you know, our general vices do not swim. But for red pens and for higher risk, again, it is for the use of the wear. And to take that, as we've talked about before, the different profiles of at the beach, or if you walk out sliding and have a, we worked on events before, staged in water, walk out a bit further, and then start your event, so that you're not in that surf zone. And just different ways of managing events. And just before August, just a circle back to that, we'll talk a minute a second, but it's for the beach user. Says some is, you know, people who go into the beach and for swimming, but we can go back to that, because they might want to talk about the kind of difference. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it says some is really targeted at, from the one where the surf zone area of the beach area, that's where the risk assessments have been done. So that's where we collect our data and compare against those thresholds for public health. We know the further you get away from the shoreline and then into the deeper water, the water quality generally improves. So we're a few relatively old studies that documented that in New Zealand. I can't remember the exact year, but it would have been sort of 2018, 2019, when we were working with the event organizers around that pen. We were talking about how we could manage their events and how it would manage their events to go ahead, because there were a few cancelled, because of water quality alerts. And it's like you say, Jim, because it was considered a workplace for some of them who were operating on that event. And we're going to, we worked through, we worked through some protocols, which is where the deep water start came from, and that was supported by us doing probably a couple of hundred thousand dollars worth of sampling at various depths out from our beaches, where ocean events were happening. So, Takapuni, Millford, Koei, trying to think there were about eight beaches, where we went out under various conditions. There's lots of samples at various depths, and that's where we got to the point where, okay, if you're going beyond chest deep, you're probably going to be reducing your risk for a whole big chunk. We can say there's no risk, but it's going to reduce your risk. And that's really important. Even when the situation says it's green, it doesn't say there's no risk, it's low risk, it's tolerable risk, that's what the government called it, but we call it low risk. There's still a chance you could get sick from swimming in that water, but it's, it's low risk. And much the same if it's red or black, it's an increased risk, but it's no guarantee you're going to get sick from swimming in that water. Look at this important point. Yeah. So, the one thing that comes from there, you guys didn't sit the limits, right? You've taken that from national standards. Yeah, so that, so that we used the New Zealand standards that were published in 2003 by Ministry for Health and Ministry for the Environment, and those are based on a whole other studies that some were done in New Zealand, and some were done in the UK, where essentially they got, they controlled people's exposure, so they got swimmers, and they all had numbered caps on, and they had to go into the water, spend a certain amount of time in the water, 10 minutes, dunk their head under three times, and then, so they would measure how many of those people got sick, and they'd measure the water quality and draw a relationship between that. So, they know from those studies that people swimming or immersing themselves in poor water quality are more likely to get sick, and that's what the guidelines come from. It's a little bit of a missing link nowadays around the health burden, because of the way, let's say, ethics have developed over the last 10 or 20 years, you would probably wouldn't get ethics approval to do that type of study these days, to put people in a situation where most of these illnesses are quite minor, but some people can get quite bad complications. We talked about how to look north thoroughly wrong, let's say 5,000 people got sick, but five people died of complications, so you know, I want to do that type of study and have that type of thing happen, so that's why you wouldn't get ethics approval for that type of thing these days. And as you said, you can get sick, and I'm sure you've seen when you're swimming all the time of the business, but you may not then think that it was something, because it's not like, you know, how to make things happen. Especially if it takes a week or so. Yeah, it's really. And respiratory infections are actually, colleagues come on stomach infections, and so, you know, if I get a cough or a cold, I don't really blame my kids, it's like, they're both sounding like a school, you know? Yeah, not because I went for a shower. So, it sounds like it's impossible to really get feedback on whether the water quality has affected people's health for a while. It's really challenging. There's probably one recent study, which was an opportunistic study, so in Copenhagen, they had a, it was equivalent of an ocean swim home and type swim event, and there was a storm forecast, and they had a model running like, much like one of the session models, and they organized the same, we need to delay the start by a couple of hours to let the tide do its thing. The competition organizers went ahead with the swim anyway, and in the following period, 45% of the people were in that event got sick, and that's written up in the newspaper. Could you use your hot-baked Olympics last year? Yes, I know, I'm not sure I watched that, but I was cringewer at least, I'm not sure if it's over on the Olympics, but their Amsterdam example is that only at least the best recent example of all the app around this time of this year. And something that we really would love to do this year is to work with a swimming group and follow the group for this summer, or for a year, and you know, have a diary and try and understand those impacts. So if you've got any volunteers that you know, we'd love to work with you. And going back to what you said before we went around, oh well, just, it's, we hate it, it's not about stopping people swimming. Everyone loves where we live, and it's like a local knowledge, and to have scientists that when, when our events and we can help and look at the rainfall, look at the model, towards the water care, do we know what are the impacts and help you manage your event? It's not like a blanket. Sometimes it is, but often it's just actually, let's work around this, what, as you say, what protocols can we put in place? I think that's really important because we all know that each week is different. Yeah, well, I guess that's, that's the reason why we're here. I just, because I guess there's a very small part of the swimming population, swimming community. They take it as gospel. There's a black pin, I'm going to take three days off, you know, whereas there's other swimmers that go, don't worry about that, it's going to swell. But if they are walking waiting into Chisdip and they're swimming out deeper, and you know, it's, it's just how we use the information and how to, I guess, understand who the target audience is, is what I was saying. I quite like the lynxing to surf after serving. I think that's awesome, because that's a little bit more from specific, you know, hey, I'm on holiday. I'm going to Northland. Yeah. I'm going to go to this beach. I've never been there before. What am I looking for, you know, is, is, is it, is it a safe swimming beach? You know, can I go deep? Are there rocks? Are there jellyfish? What do I need to look out for? And that's, I think, a big benefit for the open water swimming communities. It's not so much of water quality. Obviously, they're looking at that. But what are the other aspects? You know, what is, what does a windy day do at Tekka Pooner versus, you know, Pallet Bay? I'm going to leave for example. Yeah, wreaths, shocks, heartings, all of that type of stuff is, is really key. They're at some fantastic partnership, I know, surf, and we've been part of this kind of innovation looking at, uh, rip current, automatic, kind of, warnings and forecasting. They've been working with the universities globally to try and see how they can help to predict and communicate that. So hopefully, things across that, something that we'll see come through over the next few years. And also, another part of council have cameras at certain locations to help monitor, I guess, coastal erosion, how the coast is taking over time. But we're looking to see how we can grab those camera feeds as well. You know, sometimes there's only a way to come for the surfers, but it's really awesome to be able to see what's looking like. So that hopefully will be something this year. Some of the surf clubs have got cameras as well. So I'm really really sure my ring, but it's got a surf camera of the class. So you can sort of just lie down if it's theirs. They might be hosting it because the class will be here. Okay, but that's also marching. Yeah, obviously, you have a look like we do. It looks like, yeah. Okay, I mean, that's rising when we, when we put this thing together, it was about, okay, we did a review and there were a lot of 13 different websites you could go and get relevant information from. If you were really minded to, it's like, okay, well, how much of that stuff is really important? How much can we put into one place? Yeah. One stop shot. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Even if it's just a link to the places that they might have specialist information. Yeah. So just linking back to that getting engaged with some of the sort of swim groups. Should they just reach out to you, Holly? But what's the best way for a swim group wanted to work with you guys to, you know, to, you know, maybe to some of the boys out there. Holly has plenty of free time, so she's more like, what I'm going to suggest is that they can't take care of it. Yeah. And we can maybe sort of pass on the relevant queries. That sounds like a plan. Yeah, so we can feed three, because there's a couple of fairly big, yes, some groups around Auckland and, you know, would be interesting. And it depends how, how you want them to interact. So if you guys think about that, whether it's a form you fill out at the end of the years and how many times you are sick or whatever it is, if you think about that, then we'll get these guys to see. Yeah. Would you like to ask? Have you got talks? Yeah. Because I've got a brilliant way of getting you closer to your information if you want. Go swimming? Yeah. Love to? Cool. Maybe not at the extreme swimming side of things that you don't both do, but, you know, I love swimming. There's this extreme and there's this good fun. So, for example, the Bates Bay guys, they go out a group of anything from like five to 20 people. Yeah. And they go out into a 500 metre stints or distances and then they stop and they regroup and they make sure they're fine. Some to the next point. And there's always one person to say, oh, you know, you don't have to swim far off from back with you or something like that. There's lots of quite. Yeah. I swim in the ocean wherever I can. That's why I love what I do. Because I love those shots. It's like amazing. But now I'd really, I'd love to. And Martin, I would go and meet community groups. We talk to scout groups. We love to come and talk to swimming groups and one to help, you know, with potential studies I was just talking about. Also, to have suggestions and ideas and feedback. And it's a pretty mature system now. So, we're not this year. We're not looking to do huge changes to the system. But tweaks and things that will be helpful to the people that use it. That's exactly what we're here to do and help. Any of the other castles looking at taking on and doing the same type of thing on the South Island food novel? Yes, I think so. Well, it's really awesome to have Northland, you know, many most most Aucklanders case in Northland the whole day. So it's a natural question. So, really grateful for Northland. Wellington have started our predicted models. And I think in Canisbury and Christchurch, they're looking to do that because of those issues that you've mentioned. I think they're looking to see how they can move from that monitoring to model based approach. But yeah, not quite sure whether at the moment. I think that'd be very cool to sort of have something. Yeah, I mean, it's a challenge. You don't want to have one thing to necessarily to rule the whole country. But, you know, having one place where people can go and get reliable information. Yeah, regardless of who is provided it, it's pretty cool. Yeah, and I think that's what the cinemas just here would say, happy to share. We've got this tool developed. It's been recognised by the World Health Organisation 20. I think there's a 21. As the global example of best practice for communicating this stuff. So, wish we had a share. You know, it's too small a place to be composing. It's not about that. So, how can we have a place where others can use it or share it? I mean, that's a really important sort of comfort circle. It's it, you know, we looked around the world and we cherry picked up the cool stuff. We had to go. We're currently talking to the EPA in Melbourne. Currently talking to the environment agency in the UK. They're trying to say, okay, we'd like what you've done. How could we copy some of your elements? It becomes sort of like a full circle of, you know, learning from each other in terms of how to do the stuff, which is really good. And, you know, it's the start of it with the switch from monitoring to modelling and the site specific, but then it's those partnerships, the collaboration with surf and drama prevention or horse occur, or the health too. As we talked about Jenny Fish, to be able to communicate those issues. It's been every year, depending on the weather, is that, you know, last year, with the 23-24 after the cyclones and the sewer collapse and it was a very wet year and lost black hints, but in this year it's been so dry, but Jenny Fish. Yeah. That's all there. Everybody wants to know, I've had hundreds of emails. What other thing I wanted to ask, I don't know if it's still there, but there definitely was for a while, like a digital board, a tech pruna. Is it still there? Is it going to continue? Is it going to be the program going to get expanded? Or, you know, how does that go? Yep, it's still there. It's not even going to work, actually, it's happening. We have 13 digital science around region and they've been pretty good. Often we, you could never know if people are using them, but when they break, we're the first to know. So I think it's one of those things now it's there, it's going to be hard to, you wouldn't want to take them away. But they are quite expensive and they're there, they are not a vandal proof. Where's the digital board at tech pruna? So it's pretty close to the toilet block. As you walk down to the beach, it's just not on the lift, it's there. And physically just as I would find on a wet page, it's just all the information. But it's just about tech at pruna, I can't scroll into other things here. Yeah, so two thirds of the sign is a big screen showing the safe spin pin at that site. And then underneath you've got a kind of scrolled in board information and a QR code to what are we doing about it in your area? I've never seen it. Well, it's okay. It took me a couple of months, but there's, we've touched wood. This last couple of years, they've been less vandalised. But at the start, it took me to give us a few years ago. I mean, I'll just get rid of them because they were big vandalised They have evolved their first iteration. The first iteration was quite fragile. Yeah. And it was easy to break. And then if you did break it, you must have to replace the whole sign. Yeah. Where it's now, it's much more like this components. That's you can swap components out of. Yeah, this really is awesome. Small, uh, uh, technology engineering company that just come up with brilliant solutions to try and help my center stop the value. And that was to get over, you know, a communication problem. So, can you be, we can't send out on people who go and put beaches, be signs on the beach every time there's a water quality, because no, there's a beach is, they won't last going on. So we got the idea of the digital science from Scotland, actually, which you would think to make it too cold to swim in, but they've got these, these screens on some of their beaches that are just based up. And so that's where we got the original idea from. And we, um, we were just going to do one as a conception time. See, I went down, it was so popular, we had letters coming from counsellors and community groups. And can we get one at our beach? Yeah. And I think there's one day in St Mary's Bay, I can see it from here, which, um, I'm pretty sure the marina, the marina paid for it. And would that have water temperature and stuff? Yeah, it does. Is that water at all? It does. I think it would have jammed down in the UV. Yes, well, we're with the water temperature get measured. Um, we use, um, the... Oh, is this just an opportunity? No, we were, we were not able to force temperatures. The meat was going up for the water temp on Saeswim. Right, you. So I think you swim with the mothers, you probably have more specific, accurate readings, but we use them when it's... Yeah, it's probably... Yeah, absolutely. But it's probably more suitable for you guys as open-motion swimmers, because that's where the temperature works. Yeah, actually. You get much broader variations in the shallow water, where you can get a something that much, much better going on by 10 degrees. You swim into the beach on a, on a winter's day, you can see the drop. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it's not just all the wind and stuff, right? It's actually physical heating going on in those areas. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So talking about, um, sort of, um, what is from this specific... We're still good for time. Yep. Um, back in your mind, Holly, Martin, but potentially something to work on. Are you two, three years down the line? What I'd love to see. Let's use tech apprino as an example. Again, I arrive from Christchurch, or from Brazil, or whatever it is, I'm on holiday. Um, tech apprino, you've got your five-minute yellow boys, which are boating specific, you know, slow down on your boat to a jet ski, etc, etc. But then there's also those reg or pink swamboys, ABC, which somebody has put their, I don't even know who put them there. Do you know what they're doing? Somebody must. Could be horrible master, because that's technically strong, right? Um, how do we, how do we educate people about that? So for example, in that particular case, you know, what is the distance between the boys? How far is it to boy number one? I'm new to open waters from 50 years old, they're coming from, you know, can I make it to that boy and back? How far to the second boy? A different route stuck, if you want us from one kilometer, here's the route, if you're looking to do a three kilometer, this is the route that we recommend is safe. Um, you know, for example, when those boys get cleaned, they often get, get moved. Um, and that, that aggravates a whole bunch of swimmers as well, because they've got their little routine and the, you know, they've got their certain boy and the nerds at their point and it's their distance, but sometimes the boys are cleaned and they put back somewhere differently. So they're just, you know, from a, I guess from a half and safe perspective, where is it? So we can do it right up on safe swim as to where you can go and where you can go. But what are the physical indicators that could potentially be included down the line? Um, I'd love to explore that all, I think it's, keep us, keep talking, I think it's a great opportunities. Um, something similar that we have, similar different that we have done already, but it's currently on, um, if you go on to Pihar and say some, come on to Pihar about a beach, there's a video that's, uh, filled by a drone and it films across the beach showing you different hazards as they make, yeah, and that was a pilot, um, we, um, carried out with self-life saving and have a look, love your feedback, but it's that sort of thing, um, how we'd replicate that or maybe we could choose, um, a pilot sets the info, so, but yeah, all these suggestions, all ideas, it's absolutely just conversations and how we can help, let's keep talking, open to, open to new stuff and, um, we have up data FAQs a lot this year, safely this as can go on and if there's more information, if we've covered a lot, if there's more information, hopefully we'll find it, but we could, if there's a, if you ocean summers, we'll have, um, a website, for example, we can look into that or, um, yeah, look at these things, but there's, there's a lot of angles that we can look at, yeah, we'll keep talking, yeah, see these, look at that, look at that, look at that Pihar video, because it's really cool, um, and we, we just want sure what sort of uptake and the interest it got, and if that would be helpful to replicate in other places. Well, I think, yeah, it would be because, you know, we've kind of started talking at the beginning that there's a couple of different sort of, um, groups, and you know, this is very sort of targeted kind of at mum taking kids down to the beach, but then, you know, you, you've got surfers out there, you've got ocean, ocean swimmers out there, you've got a number of different sort of user groups that you might want and you might have to have a think about what each one of those, those other sharp groups, I just got one holly, where she's a council star for it, she works really hard, yeah. Is that what you've left council now? I could have, I was working too hard, you know, right? Um, no, I mean, we've, I've got a, I'm really less than an awesome team, um, we've probably got eight people, eight different scientists, modellers, um, subject experts working normally, say some team all the time, and we just went together, so, but I, I think it's been such a valuable conversation to hear and talk, I'm very, most expecting to ask and have time to ask you questions, but I know about information swimming, um, because as you say, we focus on, on those going to the beach, so, I'm so deeply in love to have a further conversation and get out there in the water, let's go, let's get some water, get out there. I'm a terrible swimmer, I'm never slashed for two people to beach. We'll take your kids, they can come out. I'll stay in the service, I'll stay with them. I can tell. We'll take your guys off on that, and we'll try best to, to keep in touch and provide feedback. We'll ask, um, well, I think from you know, so for all the, the listeners can just feedback to us, um, clever dicks, any of their things, yeah, if, with a, you know, if they want to hear from you directly, we can organise, um, with you, if you, you say you go and talk to different groups. Yeah, absolutely, that's that's something that some people want, yeah? They don't have any gatherings or, you know, yeah, if there's any emotions swimming awards or something like that. Yes, these, you know, that's actually a great idea. Yeah, you can, you can line Holly up and throw our sponges at it or something. Yeah, okay, Holly up on it. Our chief scientist, we know this, it feels like the one that causes the pin. Um, but if I was so if you've wanted to have full-up conversation about, um, any more of the detail I'll be covered today, if you get feedback from anybody that actually likes her, talk more on something, yeah, absolutely happy to come back. Oh, yeah, it's, it's, it's here at all, it plays out. Yeah. It's been a great conversation. And yes, we need to give you more of a chance for you to grow less. Yeah. I want to hear about the incredible things that you've achieved and the places that you've swam, you know, we can give you the, um, best features in all kind, but you can give us their stories and the animals that you've seen along the way. And there's encounters with, uh, secret eruption. Ah, ah, so I'm a hit. So I'm a weekend. Okay, that was, Well, we had a swimmer in the water. Oh, what's up, baby? I'm a hit. Oh, right. But it was just beautiful and superstar immersion, just coming to sort of have a sneaky peek at what the hell we were doing there. And then closer to Ahiki, we had a pot of about six dolphin. Come and, come and join us. So, so beautiful, right? Yeah. That's why we're here. Yeah. So blessed. You really are so blessed. I mean, it's such a wonderful place. Guys, thank you so much for your time. Really, really appreciate it. Anything else for the water? No, I think that's all good. Thank you so much. Cool. Have an awesome day. Thank you. See you soon. Hi, my name is Caitlyn O'Reilly. I'm the youngest person who have completed the Ocean 7 Challenge. And for this really cool podcast has helped you learn something new. Maybe it's introduced you to new swimmers, made you smile. Then please take the opportunity to subscribe to Duncan and Jim's channel. I'm sure they would absolutely appreciate all your support. Cheers. Thanks, Caitlyn. Well, as always, you can give us feedback on our Instagram account at Clevdix, or send us an email ClevdixNZ at gmail.com. We'd really appreciate hearing from you. And cheers. We'll speak to you again soon.