My father hated the wind. Some mammalian fear of having his hearing diminished by it? Or of his scent being carried to some distant predator? A fanner of flames and a chiller of bones, the wind was always disconcerting, if not downright dangerous. Or maybe it was just that it made a comedy of his comb-over.

Anemophobia isn’t rare. Voltaire (powdered wig precluding comb-over anxieties) claimed the east wind responsible for many suicides; “Black melancholy spreads over the whole nation”. Hippocrates accused the west wind of making people pale and sickly, with digestive organs that were “frequently deranged from the phlegm that runs down into them from the head”. Theophrastus observed that in southerly winds, “men find themselves more weary and incapable”. Shakespeare described the north wind as “wrathful and tyrannous”. Hell from all points of the compass.

Until now, I never bothered distinguishing one wind from another. But since swimming at Lorne I’ve begun to interpret the sea through the wind and become a relentless checker of wind on my phone. I have a weather app that predicts its speed and direction days ahead, and I’m getting to know what the different winds here do to the water.

The west wind is held off the beach by the hills and swoops down and becomes stronger out to sea. This can fool you. You swim out into Bass Strait marvelling at how easy it is today, despite the water looking rough. But out there, when you stop to rest before swimming back to land, you realise you’ve been duped. Until now, you’ve been swimming with the chop, but now you’re pushing into it, wind-slapped, breathless and blinded.

The easterly is a deal-breaker here. The roar of surf rolls up the hill and people are drawn to their windows at dawn to gaze at the water, scratching their bellies, but not the sleep from their eyes because they’re heading back to bed. They’re not going out in that. Fishing boats stay ashore, and swimmers on Snapchat groups call it off, one by one. The easterly organises the sea into a full-frontal assault on the town, with waves snowballing in from as far as Flinders Island, picking up attitude all the way.

Open water swimming is giving me some small perception of the wind and its choreography of the oceans.

If you’ve lived in the bush you can’t help but smell fire on a north wind. The northerly brings a mood up from your memory. Old fires your parents fought while leaves and dust churned in the hot air. Get the dogs inside the house. The deserts have come calling and by midday the hydrangeas are as limp as the people are tense. If you breathe to the left while swimming at Lorne you get the chop in the face on the way out from the beach in a north wind. But at least you know you’ll be breathing easily on the way in, with your mouth in the lee of your skull.

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The big southerlies that keep the boats at home can’t get the full majesty of their swell into our bay. On the horizon great pyramids of water run north to Aireys Inlet. But the southerly swell has to wrap around Point Grey to pivot into our bay, and in doing so, it loses heft and morale, much as a plumber does when entering a pub that has a “No Shoes, No Shirt, No Service” sign on the door.