The SWIMSAFE project closes where it began — at the water’s edge. On Sunday 27 September, the Croatian Swimming Federation hosts the project’s final conference at Hotel Niko, Amadria Park in Šibenik, presenting what the past year has produced and opening a discussion about what happens next. Participation is free and open to everyone with an interest in open water swimming.
Over twelve months, SWIMSAFE set out to close a specific gap: swimmers who are confident in a pool are not automatically safe in a lake, a river or the sea, and most drownings happen in exactly those places. The project answered that with the Open Water Safety Guidelines, a set of digital learning modules with a self-assessment quiz, and regional workshops delivered across all three partner countries — a three-day train-the-trainer course and a seminar in Ljubljana that drew more than 200 coaches and teachers, a coaches’ seminar in Kostolac held during the Serbian Open Championship, and a capacity building workshop at Lake Jarun in Zagreb that ended with participants in the water.
The programme
The morning opens at 09:00 with registration. At 09:30, Vlatka Wertheimer presents the SWIMSAFE project — its objectives, what was delivered, and what the partners learned along the way. At 10:00, Dina Levačić speaks under the title “My story — the lessons I learned”. Her account of long-distance open water swimming was among the most talked-about sessions at the Jarun workshop in June, and it does something no document can: it makes cold, fatigue and disorientation concrete rather than theoretical. At 10:50, Marko Đurović closes the presentations with a session on safe open water swimming, before the conference moves at 11:35 into networking over refreshments — deliberately unhurried, because the connections made between federations, clubs and institutions are part of what keeps a project’s results alive after its funding ends.
Why the closing matters
A project ends; the problem it addresses does not. The conference is therefore as much about continuation as conclusion — how the guidelines and learning modules get embedded into national swimming programmes, who keeps using them, and how the network of trained coaches across Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia stays connected once the project year is over.
All project materials remain freely available at www.swim-safe.eu, in the languages of the partner countries.
Co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.