Aurora Randolph wades in the center of the deep end of the Blatchley Middle School pool. Over by the pool’s edge, one of Randolph’s students takes a deep breath before swimming toward her. She watches closely.
“You kept that form perfect the whole time,” she tells the student. “That was great.”
But she’s not leading a Blatchley Middle School swim practice. This is an adult mermaid class.
After an hour, Randolph tells her students to take a breather. “Get some water, stretch your legs out, stretch your ankles out, make sure they’re feeling good.”
The mer-students need a stretch because they’re probably not used to swimming this way. After a 10-minute break, it’s time to slide into their gear and head back to the deep end. The swimmers slip their feet into monofins. They’re like a pair of flippers except their feet are bound together by a piece of rubber shaped like a dolphin tail.
Randolph describes the next step of suitting up like “trying to put on pants when you don’t want to get the pant leg wet.”
She bunches up a thin spandex sleeve speckled with scales and pulls it over her fins. Her tail shimmers with a mosaic of pinks, purples, and blues with frills flowing from the tail’s fluke.
“We’ve been kind of joking at the pool that I am now a professor of the mermaid arts at the pool for Mermaid Academy,” she says.
Randolph works for the city’s Parks and Recreation Division. Last week, she taught kids how to swim with mermaid tails.
“And then a few people reached out that were like, ‘Is there an age limit on the kid class?’”
Erika Apathy was one of those people. She wanted to try something she’d never done before, and mermaid class seemed just the thing. Apathy says she swam when she was in school, “but it’s totally different, right, to have your feet kind of stuck together.”
During their first lesson, Randolph focused on basic mermaid mechanics: how to properly propel and quickly ditch their tails in case something went wrong. Now, her students look to master the artistry of pencil dives, tail flips, and bubble kisses.
“You’re going to take a nice big breath, you’re going to go down, and then you’re just going to blow out all those bubbles and push them out to the world like this,” she explains.
The pool goes quiet as the students dunk their heads below the surface to watch Randolph’s underwater demonstration through their goggles.
“Water is probably gonna go up your nose on this one,” she warns after coming back up for air.
Randolph says mermaiding is as much a technical sport as it is an art form. And after two days of two-hour classes, her students seem to have mastered both aspects.
“Now we have graduates of Mermaid Academy,” Randolph says. “Class of summer 2026 and the start of the official Sitka Southeast Mermaid Pod.”
One of those graduates is Ashlynn Emanoff. She says she signed up for the adult mermaid class after seeing how much fun her younger sister had during the kids’ session. Now, they have a new way to spend time together.
“That was one of the first things [my sister] said once her class was finished,” Emanoff says. “She said, ‘We can swim together, and oh, it was so cute.”
Randolph says she’s been a mermaid for a decade, mostly in warmer places, like Florida and St. Croix. Whether she’s swimming in springs or scuba diving next to sea turtles, she has always felt most at home in the water.
“Being a mermaid feels so correct in the most magical way possible for me.”
Sitka’s new mermaids glide back to the shallow end, take off their tails, and hop out of the pool. As they head to the locker room, Randolph’s glad she invited them to be part of her world.
