Mermaid Lessons with South Coast Mermaids

*AD – this experience was gifted to our household for this post. All opinions, as always, are our own.

I love the water! When I was a child, I would spend every moment I could in my nanny’s pool, swimming until the sun went down. This year, if you’ve been checking out my Instagram, you’ll know I’ve been at the beach nearly every week. I am basically a mermaid stuck in a human body, with silly legs that stop me from having fins. When I found out that South Coast Mermaids do lovely mermaid lessons – and who doesn’t want to be a mermaid – so I was very excited to go! South Coast Mermaids do adult and children swimming lessons, as well as parties. This lesson is post COVID, so we were social distancing mermaids, something that our instructor, Anna, kept in mind during the entire lesson. I attended one at the Lido Arundel, which is a lovely setting with a castle peaking over the treeline!

The Tail and Fin

A key part to becoming a mermaid is the tail. When I arrived to our lesson, Anna let us choose from so many different, unique, colorful tails! The tail I ended up picking was called Groovy Gobi from Fin Fun, which had all sorts of different colors on a bit of a blue background. This tail really showed up through the water well and looked good with my (borrowed from Claire) galaxy swim suit! Once our tails were picked, the bottom flipper was inserted, as these fabric tails are stored without any fin. The fins themselves are made of thin plastic with almost like socks in them, that you need to put over your feet, making sure to cover your ankles. Anna explained that these were quick release fins, meaning that if we kicked both our feet out, we would be able to release the fin from our feet easily and detach. This is great for those who haven’t used fins before and might need to quickly let them go!

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Putting on the tail was quite… interesting. I got on my mat, moved the tail down to see the fin, got my feet in easily – but then it was time to get the tail up. This is done by pulling up the fabric of the tail and sort of doing the worm on a mat, trying to get the fabric up around us! We were all like flopping fish at this bit, which was pretty funny, but once you are settled into your tail and fin, it’s so worth it.

In the Water

Once we had all posed, taken tons of selfies and really got use to the tail, it was time to go into the water! Anna instructed us on how to get into the pool safely, and then started running through different moves we could do across the pool. Soon, we were swimming across, doing tail flips, hand stands, and even barrel rolls in the water in our tails. Swimming with the tail took a little bit of time for me to get use too, as I am use to kicking my feet instead of using my legs and hips to swim like a fish. All of Anna’s instructions were really easy to follow and understand, which helped us all get use to things quite quickly though! The tricks that we were able to do were also really fun, I quite liked watching everyone tail flip in the air, smashing their tail against the water, before continuing to swim on wards.

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I felt really graceful swimming, but found it challenging standing, if that makes sense. When standing in the pool, you now have this big tail to get the right way around, to stand in place. I also found myself drifting quite a bit when trying to float around, but when I moved, I could understand and feel where I was going! After we had swam our hearts out and learned everything we could about how to swim in these tails, Anna gave us all crowns and accessories to play around with in the water and we were free to swim as we felt fit. There were a lot of picture taking and fun being had – I really felt like a mermaid!

Final Thoughts

I really loved being a mermaid! There wasn’t any moment in the water that I felt unsafe or like I wasn’t sure what I was doing. It was so fun learning all of those different moves and swimming about. I do wish that I was better at hand stands so I could have done more of them in the water, showing off my tail and fin! I’d totally be a mermaid again and really look forward to another class, as it’s just a great time.

South Coast Mermaids are planning on expanding to adult mermaid fitness classes in London in January of 2021, but a bit sooner, Anna is planning on swimming the English Channel distance in a mermaid tail, which will take her around 14 hours, in September of this year. People can choose to take a mermaid tail session alongside her and be included in the record! Keep an eye on South Coast Mermaids’ website and Instagram to keep up with all these cool events.

You can check out our other Days Out to see what else we’ve been up too!