It's like swimming in ink.
A streetlight casts a shadow ahead of me as I step into the shallows but I am soon in the water's darkness, out of the light's reach.
Twenty metres from the shore and I'm waist deep in the ink. The red, green and orange lights of the shipping channels blink in unison in the bay, guiding the fishing boats and the cargo ships that are only discernible by their long-distance lamps.
To the south, orange dots mark the arc of the bayside suburbs while much closer are the streetlights curving around this little metropolitan beach, splashing pools of yellow and white on the footpath and the road between the life-saving club and the fishing ramp.
There is a swimmer out in the deeper water, beyond the yellow buoys. I can neither see him nor hear him but know he is there because his bike and his clothes are in their usual spot by the footpath.
He is out there, a fellow water man, in the real dark, in the blue-black ink. I am just here in the shallows, for I am not a swimmer. I go for a dip, not for a fair dinkum swim. Call it a type of baptism, or a wake-up dip, but don't call it a swim.
There are silhouettes of joggers now, of walkers and their dogs. On the road a flurry of cyclists, headlights and tail-lights flashing. You can't see their lycra, but you can hear their voices, urging each other on.
A Japanese woman stops by one of the streetlights and reads a few pages of a book, a book in which the ink set on the pages some time ago.
On my way here I passed a slowly moving car, its driver tossing newspapers onto driveways, the ink on the pages having only dried a few hours beforehand.
The first inks were possibly invented by the ancient Egyptians and Chinese, perhaps by mixing water with berries. Indian ink may have been used in about 400 BC, made with burnt bones, tar, pitch, and other substances.
As the woman walks to her next reading post I stop procrastinating and lunge into the water.
In daylight hours I usually swim with a snorkel, for I've yet to figure out the knack of breathing when swimming. But donning a snorkel would be ridiculous, comical, here in the half-hour before dawn.
It is surprising, though, what one can see, in the