After the initial shore break, it looks like typical light swell conditions?
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Power of the crowd and all that BS won’t help you out there… 
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Maybe if they put The Crowd out there on floating pontoons or something, they’d spot people in trouble quicker?
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I don’t know why the swim wasn’t moved… in hindsight that would have been a smarter move
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I’ve just seen the story about this. Looking at that pic, it’s the kind of swim I like because I don’t slow down as much as others. Being surf aware and able to read the sea comes naturally, to me, but that’s me and most people aren’t like that.
Sea swims are no joke even if you aren’t easily panicked by adverse conditions but they can be catastrophic if you are. The sad fact is that simply too many people do their swim training in a pool with no real commitment to swimming in a sea that could be rough.
There might be some half hearted dips whilst on holiday somewhere but preparing for something other than millpond or gentle waves seems only prudent.
We don’t only ride our bikes in the dry and think WTF do I do if it’s wet, so why enter a race where is a chance of it being like this and not be prepared?
I don’t know about the two people concerned, they could be genuinely good sea swimmers and had very tragic days but I suspect that for every good/competent sea swimmer out there today, there were a whole lot that weren’t.
If you really aren’t confident on the morning, for goodness sake don’t just wade in there to save face. Bail and live to see your family.
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IM are well aware that a high percentage of the target audience are novices. To me at least this means that whoever they hand a contract to has a full understanding of risk assessment and does not put athletes at unnecessary risk.
In the video i saw, the conditions were challenging and probably on the limit. It takes some skill to swim through surf and swim with the surf back. Many of those in the video did not have the necessary skills and were unable to get 10 m from the shore.
In the final two minutes of the video, one swimmer is detached from the main group and waving for assistance. The crowd are calling for assistance but there is no evident water safety coming to the swimmer’s aid.
Whilst it is the responsibility of the athlete to prepare themselves appropriately, it is also the responsibility of the race organiser to provide appropriate safety for the athletes participating. If they are unable to do that, then they must cancel the swim.
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Is that from Doonies video?
Just clicked the link and it’s not working, possibly been removed?
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Love Youghal facebook page
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I did one tri once in a Lake with quite choppy water. What really helped were the red flashing lights on the buoys.
I’ve always reckoned that buoys in most tris are usually too far apart though.
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Pure speculation but they moved to rolling swim
starts to get the novice crowd in, by removing the barrier of the horrifying mass start.
But wonder if less fear has led to less diligent prep for some people….
Wales 2014 was utterly horrific for every inch of the swim.
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Yeah. A sea swim. In Wales. In September?
Nah, not for me thanks 
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And like @jorgan said earlier. This is one of THE simplest and most cost effective fixes. A few extra buoys, with lights that are a bit bigger. I liked his idea about the balloons. It’s not that difficult is it?!
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I did a race once, can’t remember where but they had large buoys at each of the turns and smaller ones on the straights in-between, I can’t remember how they were mounted but it was a very easy swim to navigate. I thought at the time why more races didn’t do it.
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There were lots of really poor swimmers at Copenhagen yesterday, people doing breaststroke on their back, holding on to the kayaks and standing up because the water is shallow.
But at least that’s in a fairly safe calm and shallow lagoon and all the truly bad ones had at least one kayaker with them so it at least felt safe.
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I’d imagine an overly cautious approach in Tenby now - slight bit of chop, off on a 1st run up and down the front you go 
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Ironman Canada had that configuration. Larger buoys on the cornes and middle of the straights with smaller buoys in between. It’s probably the straightest I’ve ever swam (and the slowest but that’s not important 
)
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Ah I see, when you said there were bad swimmers, I thought you meant some people were just slow (i’m slow but confident, definitely a ‘diesel swimmer’ ). but if your swim strategy in calm water is to hang to each kayak, then you aren’t prepared.
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Lots of people floating (yellow caps), hanging on to kayaks (red caps) at London. Still don’t know why there was a two hour delay after 11 there.
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When I did Consiton there were buoys every mile. They wertr massive inflatable things, must have been about 2 metres high by 1 wide. The kake was a little choppy but you could see these from a great distance
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I’ve seen the swim video, there were some fairly high breakers but they came and went and the swell didn’t look horrific. It’s been similar at Barcelona when I’ve done it. And others.
Certainly not supporting Ironman here, a 10 second clip is hard to make a judgement. But that swim got binned previously.
But they need to factor in the poor swimmers that are basically trying to avoid the cutoff. I think most of us here are at least competent swimmers and in some cases have a background of water sports like surfing and windsurfing so have quite likely had some experience.
Re: buoys, I’m blind as bat in the swim but very rarely had a problem in a branded IM, usually big and fairly easy to spot. ADH was probably the worst, I think there was 3 buoys over 2.2k, and 2 of them were the far turns 
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