Fire, Salt and Sea
Part 9 of BLOWING HOT AND COLD, my sauna memoir, told week by week
Blowing Hot and Cold is a slow memoir, told through weekly posts, about saunas, cold water, and how these things come together to boost my own mental health. It’s meant to be a year-long journey, but we’ll get up to Christmas and see what happens after that.
From midsummer nights in Finland to horsebox saunas on English beaches, from community gardens to embassy basements, each piece explores what happens when heat and cold strip life back to its essentials.
This is part nine, about time spent at Fire, Salt and Sea in Worthing
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In the days that followed I slept like a stone and found new reserves of energy, my anxiety quelled to a whisper, enough to make me human but not so much that I couldn’t function. I was less quick to anger than usual, more aware of my surroundings - the herring gulls that hung on the wind along the shoreline, the sparrows that squabbled in the box hedges on the way to collect the kids from school, the unexpected sight of a fox taking a shit in daylight hours as I walked home. Everything felt heightened, more tangible in its beauty and essence.
The fatigue from the SSRIs seemed to have gone, at least initially. After a week though, the tiredness was creeping back in, but the balance afforded by my time in the heat stayed with me. I needed to get back into the dance between hot and cold to see what other benefits it could bring.
Dave was sitting on a camp chair, sharpening a pen knife on a pebble, when I arrived. Despite it being winter there was a warmth to the sun, the sky untroubled by the clouds, the slump of the brown-grey sea drowning out the traffic along Worthing seafront.
I’d been meaning to visit Fire, Salt and Sea ever since Dave and I had met briefly at Bella’s sauna the previous summer. Finally here, its location and appeal was obvious. A small horsebox trailer parked just on the pebbles of Worthing beach, a lean-to tent for changing and a few deck chairs arranged to look out over the English Channel: the set up was minimal and all the better for it. Cold water therapy came from a choice between a sea dip and freshwater poured over your head from a pair of stainless steel watering cans.
After a brief hello, I parked myself next to the stove alongside Judith, a local who had come down for the first time. We gently poured on some water and allowed the heat to rise, falling into conversation about parenthood, life by the coast and the uplifting power of taking time for a steam up.
Dave’s sauna was special, thanks largely to the large window which looked right out over the water. Often horsebox saunas are cramped affairs, with a stove at the far end and a small window you can just about see out of. This was altogether different, allowing Judith and I to take moments of silence and feel connected to nature without having to step outside.
One step in and the pull of the current sucks you deeper
Naturally, there came a time when the heat grew too much, so we headed down to the water’s edge for a dip. The sea at Worthing slams in at right angles, breakers twisting their way onto the beach. One step in and the pull of the current sucks you deeper. The tide was rising and I found myself standing ankle depth one second, fully immersed the next. My body had moved all of one metre. I allowed the wave to hold me under, pushed out all of my breath and emerged into what felt like a hissing maelstrom. I stumbled my way back to the Crocs Dave had supplied, slipped them on and, after a glug of water, parked myself in the same spot, the shingle from the beach giving my backside an unexpected and not entirely unpleasant exfoliation.
Over the next hour we chatted and dipped and poured the contents of the watering cans over our heads. Dave served up slices of orange and fed the stove with freshly cut logs from a hole on the outside of the horsebox. The time passed in a flash and I towelled myself off feeling buoyant, thanks not just to the sauna but also the life-giving power of the sun on my face. Afterwards, Dave and I sat down to talk.
Dave’s story is perhaps the classic one when it comes to why saunas have popped up all over the country. A dedicated sea swimmer, Dave began warming up in Brighton’s Beach Box when it first opened in 2018. Soon, the swimming became secondary, his love of the blend of hot and cold becoming an obsession he could not shake.
After Covid, he left Brighton behind for the more sedate but equally beautiful surroundings of Worthing where, having steeped himself in sauna’s culture and tradition, he opened Fire, Salt and Sea in 2021. Really though, it was his dedication that shone through.
‘It’s not easy,’ he said, a black baseball cap shielding his eyes from the low winter sun. ‘I do 14 hour days and I’m here in all weathers. I only really shut up shop when the wind gets up above 50mph.’ That’s become more frequent in recent years, as climate change powered storms seem to batter the south coast with what has become terrifying regularity, he explained.
That dedication was all the more evident thanks to the fact that Fire, Salt and Sea isn’t a permanent seafront sauna like so many of its sister spots along the coast. Instead, Dave pulls his horsebox on his van to the same spot on Marine Parade, opposite a Premier Inn and a terrace of listed Georgian mansions, each morning, coupling it and removing it every evening. Then it’s a case of setting up the lean to, prepping the lemon-infused drinking water, putting out the chairs and ensuring the watering cans are full without access to running water. There’s no loo and I didn’t dare ask where Dave went when he felt nature calling. I needed a wee for the best part of 45 minutes while I was with him.
Sauna people, I had found, are almost always level headed, balanced and effusive about what their passion can bring to peoples’ lives. Dave was no exception. Like Bella and Emma, he had an overriding belief that the more people used sauna regularly, the better it would be for society. That mental health conditions could be eased due to the exposure to short bursts of acute as exposed to chronic inflammation, something studies into cold water immersion by the University of Portsmouth had already shown. That conditions such as heart disease could be eased. And that the world in general could be a calmer, more measured place when people came together in a space that levelled the playing field for a few minutes each week without the aggravating factor of a few drinks.
Sauna people are almost always level headed, balanced and effusive about what their passion can bring to peoples’ lives
Dave, though, also carried with him a hearty and righteous distaste for the local council, who were refusing him permission to make Fire, Salt and Sea a permanent fixture. They were worried, he claimed, that it would ‘set a precedent’.
‘By that they mean the coffee stands would want to do the same.’
This, then, was the reason Dave had to resort to watering cans, didn’t have a plunge pool or ice bath and couldn’t offer the luxury of a portaloo. Word was the residents’ association of the aforementioned Regency homes were none too keen either. It all seemed mean-spirited, at least to someone who had felt the magical power of sauna on the beach and had come to see what it could do for everybody, especially when offered at budget prices and with the local community in mind. To rub salt in the wounds, a new chain of saunas had managed to get a prime location along the beach on private land, meaning they could have all the amenities offered by Dave, doubtless taking some of his business in the process.
‘The mad thing is they’d get £10,000 a year in rent from me,’ Dave bemoaned. I felt for him and departed wondering if the powers that be realised how transformative sauna like this, Scandinavian style, could be for all of us. It seemed that open minds were needed to turn this very DIY revolution into something more concrete.
This is a slow memoir, told week by week, about sauna, cold water, and the messy business of mental health.
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