There are many reasons for people to learn swimming in the ocean.

• Pragmatic people realize that, once they make even a few steps into the ocean, the currents (rip or toe) can drag them to their deaths: thousands die because of that every year.
• Lots of surfers die every year, especially when they lose their surf board, when they realize it too late that they are unable to swim across the shorebreak as they cannot swim distances long enough and for as long as necessary in these conditions.
• Even if you don't step into the water, a freak/rogue wave can easily wash you off your feet into the sea.
• Some more intelligent surfers do realize that being able to swim in any waves is a basic survival skill.
• There are people who realize that their floating device will be a disadvantage once the wind starts blowing from the land.
• Whether you are accidentally pushed into a raging river or land in a lake after a parachute jump, your regular swimming pool skills will not be sufficient.
• Many understand that they or their children may one day find themselves on a capcised boat 2 miles offshore, on a Titanic in the middle of the ocean, on a sinking lake boat, on a bridge being washed away by a raging river.
• There is no beach swimming culture in India. The Indians who want to integrate socially in Europe, the US or Australia, find that keeping company with their local friends implies going to the beach and swimming there.
• Swimming is the closest experience to flying. The gravitation on the Earth weighs heavily upon us, and we instinctively aspire to escape from its clutches, whether in our dreams or in meditation.
• Those who practise it as a form of yoga, do it to achieve laya, the expansion of consciousness, which is easy in the ocean as the boundaries of your own body are dissolved in the warm water and the waves lull you into a meditative state. From a mystic's point of view, the ocean is in fact a living being rather than a dead mass of water. To be able to swim in the ocean comfortably and even effortlessly, one has to learn how to control one's body movements and reactions, one's breathing and one's mind, which is where there are similarities to elements of Hatha and Raja Yoga. Swimming is the closest form of movement to flying, which is what we often do in the worlds other than the material. It has certain similarities with watsu.