Hundreds of people have taken part in the annual Christmas Eve dip at Helen’s Bay beach in County Down.<\/p>\n
Around 500 swam while another 500 watched from the shoreline at the festive event run by the open water swim group, Helen’s Baywatch.<\/p>\n
Many of the swimmers wore Santa hats or red swimsuits for the annual Christmas swim, now in its 29th year.<\/p>\n
Environment Minister Andrew Muir, mayor of Ards and North Down Gillian McCollum and former Irish rugby international Trevor Ringland were among the dippers.<\/p>\n
Muir said the swim was “reinvigorating for body and mind” and a good way to start Christmas.<\/p>\n
Asked about improving water-quality around the coast of Northern Ireland, including Helen’s Bay, he insisted the issue was “top of my agenda”.<\/p>\n
Although most of the swimmers came from County Down or greater Belfast, some travelled from Enniskillen, Portadown and Ballymena for the dip.<\/p>\n
While most only stayed in the water only briefly, some swam for 20 minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Hundreds of people have taken part in the annual Christmas Eve dip at Helen’s Bay beach in County…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":333840,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-333839","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333839","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=333839"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333839\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/333840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}