Probably the least wild "wild swimming" ever

[Brick]

http://www.gizmag.com/plus-floating-...c-river/19010/

It's a hot summer day, you're sweaty and uncomfortable, and there's a river full of cool, clear water right beside you. Do you jump in? Not if you're in New York City, as the rivers that flow through that city are too polluted for swimming ... or at the very least, that's the perception that most people have of them. Three young entrepreneurs, however, have proposed a way of getting New Yorkers into the Hudson, East and/or Bronx Rivers. It's called the +Pool (Plus Pool) - a public swimming pool that would float in the river, allowing people to swim in filtered river water.

(My emphasis)

[selkie]

But at least you've got a nice view when you're swimming backstroke, and you don't have to worry about shipping traffic. There are actually a few open water races and triathlons that use the Hudson River for the swim, and as long as it hasn't rained hard in about the past two days to push bacteria counts up, it's supposed to not be too awful of a swim venue.

[Dave_G]

I'd rather they invested in anti-pollution measures, so that people could swim in the rivers themselves!

[selkie]

The US has actually spent quite a bit of money over the past 30 years cleaning up rivers, and rerouting stormwater and sewer overflow drains into appropriate places. The big problem is dealing with contaminated debris that's been sitting in the river bottom for 200+ years in some cases. First hw you find it, and second how you remove it in a way that contains contamination.

The city of 200,000 people where I grew up has now spent in the neighborhood of $800 million US on zero discharge sewer work to end contamination in nearby rivers. It's apparently getting good press these days as an urban trout stream-if you work in one of the downtown office buildings you can take the suit off, put the waders on, and go fish on your lunch hour. (Alas, it's not a good river in other ways for swimming, though the kayakers and crew rowers have some nice stretches for human-powered boat use, and they're even tlking about adding a whitewater course as part of a dam removal and river restoration program.)

[Brick]

I wasn't being too serious about my "least wild 'wild swimming'" comment. If you ignore the floating bit, it's a Lido, and Lidos are nicer places to swim than an indoor pool. IMHO. But it did amuse me that they were in a way insulating the swimmers from the natural world around them.

If a river has trout in it, then it should be way beyond "clean enough to swim in". With certain fish and other living creatures (e.g. dippers), my mantra is "if it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me".