'It was really tough': Cork duo's freezing sea challenge 

“ The sea is black this time of year, cold enough to empty the lungs, honest enough to tell you who you are.”

The ocean growls as it rolls across Fountainstown’s rocky shoreline, biting and nipping furiously at the occasional curious toe. Beyond the whitewater, the waves loom large, murky, and very, very cold.

The ocean at this time of year is impatient, squeezing the air from your chest instantly and burning your skin. It is relentless, ripping and dragging with its claws beneath the waves. It is merciless, causing hypothermia within minutes and refusing to bend to bravado or ego.

It cares nothing for deadlines, or plans or responsibilities; it waits without invitation with a steely blue stare.

On the beach, Joleen Cronin is laughing as she stares back.

There is always laughter with Joleen; it arrives as she does, fiery and unfiltered.

She was brought up in Crosshaven, her family pub the hub for a community married to the sea; she knows its rage but also its grace. She bends her red head into the wind, a quick shake of her bare shoulders, a glance back at her friend Shane McAuliffe as if to say, here we go again.

And then she runs in.

‘Out there with the land a little further away, everything slows. You feel how powerful this place is, how fast it can turn, how much respect it demands of you.’

Today will be the day that her Freezebury goal of 200 minutes spent immersed in the icy waters will be reached and surpassed.

The daily plunge, a February commitment shared with her friend Shane McAuliffe, a volunteer with the RNLI as it marks its centenary, is, on paper, a fundraiser, a gesture towards the remarkable volunteers who stand between disaster and deliverance along Ireland’s coastline. For Joleen, however, it has become so much more.

Through Joleen Cronin Photography, she has carved out a pivotal space in Ireland’s food and hospitality scene. 2025 was marked with successful, career-defining projects, from photographing the warm and tactile images that add colour to Eunice Power’s first cookbook, My Irish Kitchen Table, to working with Breakthrough Cancer Research on an ambitious and heartfelt project, which involved photographing people at different points in their cancer journeys.

These intimate portraits, which are still on display in Dublin’s Stephen’s Green, capture the sitters’ vulnerability in a featherlight way only Joleen has mastered.

Joleen has a way of making people feel comfortable through the infectious joy she exudes; it’s a word that defines her outwardly, and it softens the space between her lens and subject. However, between the out-facing client work, deadlines, and steady build of a successful freelance career, Joleen admits she began to feel inwardly that her own contentment and personal creativity were slipping out of reach.

“I was seeking extra ways to fulfil my personal creative goals and objectives… so when Shane approached me about doing Freezebury this year, I thought, this is great, but is there a way I can have some creative fun with it? So I wrote a poem about what it’s like to be in that moment of stepping in that water — the resilience, the resistance, the gratitude, the respect, the friendship, the complete immersion, the slowing down of time — and then we photographed those words against a beautiful morning in Rocky Bay.”

For Shane, the sea carries a different history. As someone who wasn’t brought up with the water, he came to sailing later in life and admits there is always some trepidation when you go out on the water recreationally, knowing that there is an element of danger involved. “It is a place you have to approach with caution and respect.”

A few years ago, he found himself on a boat that had to be brought safely to shore by the RNLI under very precarious conditions. The experience left its mark, so much so that Shane recently went through the extensive training required to become a volunteer with the RNLI in Crosshaven.

He recognised the significant investment that is put into the volunteers and felt it important to find a way to give back, and so was on the look-out for fundraising opportunities.

He admits there could have been easier options.

“As we’re all aware, February was a really bad month weather-wise, so Joleen and I got off to a very bouncy start… there were big waves, a biting easterly wind… when we were getting in for the first few days, it was really tough.”

Joleen, with a shrug, puts it more bluntly. “It’s been absolute madness, I nearly died of hypothermia.”

Long before this year’s fundraiser, Joleen had already learned to look at Ireland from the water. After several years spent crewing boats and travelling, she returned to Cork with what she describes as ‘an armful of coastal photographs’ and a perspective few on land have seen. She brought them to the offices of The Echo, and the project that followed, Coast of Cork, became more than a book; it was the beginning of a creative life shaped by the tide, community, and an instinct to see things differently.

As the pair dry off, dragon breath and steam rising from pinkened skin, the wild Atlantic has lost some of its menace. The last stretch of their 20-minute dip dissolved into laughter as Joleen, sporting a giant shark head, chased a shivering Shane through the shallows.

The same sea that earlier felt severe and dangerous feels suddenly less like a threat and more like a playground. Still demanding respect, still cold, but softened by fun, friendship, and a very good cause.

• To support the fundraiser, see: https://www.idonate.ie/fundraiser/teamfreezebury