By Tatiana Schlossberg

New York Times

NEW YORK >> The boardwalk crawled with Santas, mermaids and polar bears. Music was blasting from the speakers. People were dancing, spreading out blankets on the sand, or sipping from flasks as they greeted old friends.

It looked like Coney Island on a particularly festive summer day, except that it was Jan. 1, when thousands of people flock to the seaside to start their year off the right way — with an unseasonal ocean swim.

The Coney Island Polar Bear Club has been meeting for ice bathing on New Year’s Day since 1903. Members also take constitutional dips every Sunday between November and April.

On Friday, most people — evenly split between men and women, who represented all age groups — wore bathing suits or something like them. A wetsuit, it seemed, might be too attention-grabbing, in the wrong way. And, the effort required to get in and out of one was perhaps too much for the few seconds most swimmers spent in the water. (A full submerging did seem necessary for the swim to count, however.)

Dennis Thomas, the club’s president and a member for more than 30 years, said he was anticipating bigger crowds than normal because of the warm weather. More people had preregistered online this year than in the past, he said. The beach looked much more crowded than it had in previous years, veteran dippers said, but an official tally was not yet available.

“It’s like summer out here,” Floyd Simmons, of Queens, said. (He was, however, wearing a plush-looking bathrobe, a hat shaped like a bear’s head, a sweater, sweatpants and shoes.)

Last month was the warmest December on record in New York, according to the National Weather Service, with an average temperature of 50.8 degrees — 13.3 degrees above the normal average. Given that fact, some swimmers hoping to prove their mettle with a wintry dunk in the ocean said they came to the beach expecting this year to be their best chance to do so without chattering teeth.

They could be forgiven for that assumption: Ocean temperatures in the area have remained in the low 50s, though the average ocean temperature in waters around the city is around 43 degrees in December.

But their confidence in the recent warm spell turned out to be slightly optimistic. At around 1 p.m., the time of the plunge’s first heat (a cruel word in this context), the air temperature was about 42 degrees, warmer than the day’s historical average of 33. But let us not forget the wind, which was blowing at about 21 mph, with gusts up to 31.

By comparison, the high temperature last New Year’s day was about 39 degrees, with winds at about 7.1 mph, and the water was a bone-chilling 41.7 degrees at the time of the swim. On Friday the water was a cold-bathtub-like nearly 50 degrees. Not so bad, you might tell yourself.

Bob Oliver, a member of the Polar Bear Club in Long Beach, New York, said it felt pretty warm compared to previous years. He swims regularly in the ocean at home, but has been coming to Coney Island on New Year’s Day for 10 years, he said, because “it’s a good freak show.”

He added that the air temperature was not really a mitigating factor in these swims: “Once you drop below a certain temperature in the water, it doesn’t matter what the weather is like. It’s just cold.”

Louis Bernier and Stephanie Fiset, a couple from Quebec City, Quebec, were shivering while they still had their coats and hats on. They had come south for New Year’s Eve, and the swim at Coney Island was on their to-do list.

Even they thought it was cold.

“In Canada, we’ll do things like go in the hot tub and then go lie in the snow,” Fiset said, quickly adding, “but then we go get back in the hot tub.”

Amanda Sabater, of Manhattan, was futilely trying to warm up after getting out the water, wearing a parka that dragged on the ground.

“I 100 percent came out here because I thought, ‘Well if it’s been so warm lately, then this is probably the year to do it.’ “

Did the experience match her toasty expectations? “Absolutely not.”

But getting comfortable with the idea of being uncomfortable is, for some, the biggest obstacle.

“The prospect this year was less intimidating than last year” because the weather was less punishing, Monica Halpert, who lives in Manhattan and came for her second plunge, said. “But the experience was about the same.”

As people prepared to do something that they would not dream of on most other days, a strong feeling of community and camaraderie began to emerge.

That is, if camaraderie can be defined as a shared feeling of “we’re all doing this, and we don’t want to, but let’s do it anyway!”

© 2016 The New York Times Company