St. Helier
Helier was a priest from Normandy who was often considered an eccentric. However, we was just one of a tide of clerics who centered their ministry on the sea in the wake of St. Wulfram's work in Frisia. Where a new generation of bathers, no longer afraid of dark sea gods, would dare to venture out into deeper water, Helier was there to chide them on their immodest choice in bathing attire, or even liken the dark water to another spiritual domain: the hell that awaited them if they wished to stray from grace.
A formidable tactic of Helier's was to walk out into the water at the very lowest tide and wait for potential souls to harangue. His great asceticism endowed him with a tolerance for darkness and cold which allowed him to wait hours for the arrival of bathers. One of two scenarios would typically play out. The first was a swimmer in over his head, showing signs of drowning. Helier would come seemingly out of nowhere and save the wretch, who would naturally be quite receptive to the word of the Lord. If the swimmers of a day proved to be stronger, Helier would creep just underneath them, jumping out at a moment calculated to cause fear. The effect would be similar to saving someone from drowning, and a religious lesson would ensue.
It so happened that Helier's zeal led him to push farther and farther from shore, and he ended up swimming to an island in the English Channel, now known as Jersey. There he found natives who, like the inhabitants of Frisia generations before, remained uninterested in bathing in the open water, and ignorant of the Church. Helier converted them all, and now lends his name to the capital of the Isle of Jersey.
