Hello All,
Mark Scanlon successfully completed his English Channel crossing in a storming 9½ hours in August:
Excerpts:
Well I should have known that flying into London on Friday the 13th was never going to be a good omen. From the outset it seemed as though the Channel gods were against me. I spent 19 days waiting in a caravan for this swim to eventuate and feeling like I might be heading home without getting a shot at the channel.
Free Ride back to the Boat
To put some light on this I guess I need give you some background on swimming the English Channel. You can’t just rock up and do it, although it would be a lot cheaper, you need to arrange for a pilot and an observer to guide you accross safely and ratify the swim. There are around a dozen registered pilots who typically book 3-4 swimmers for a ‘neep’ tide (the best tide to swim on with the least tidal variation – i.e less amount of water moving through the channel – less currents to fight against). As channel swimming has become more popular in the last 5-10 years the number of people looking to swim in duos, teams and solos has increased darmatically, however the number of pilots has remained relatively unchanged.
This is fine if the wether is good, but becomes a problem if you get a couple of weeks of bad weather (which lets face it – it’s England, its not all that uncommon) and all of a sudden there is a massive backlog of swimmers to get away. Compounding this skippers are now taking bookings on the ’spring’ tides which, in the past, were typically left vacant to get swims away that were blown out due to bad wether on the previous neep.
It was an eerie feeling swimming in the dark for so long. I’d swum in the dark before but only for an hour or so. Knowing light was a good 4 hours away was a bit dunting but in hindsight mentally it really broke up the swim nicely.
The thoughts of sharks creeping up on me in the darkness probably got me swimming a bit faster too! I had a flashing light on my head so the crew could see me in the dark, so there was a disco strobe effect pulsing through the water as I was swimming.
To be honest the swim itself was pretty uneventful with everything going to pretty much to plan. The most exciting thing was the seal that was tailing me as we came into French waters – thankfully no signs of the escaped croc the week before. There was a nor west 2m wind swell early on which died out and the wind changed more northerly to north east which is basically a side chop the whole way. This was a bit rougher than we’d all expected so I was glad I necked a few sea sickness tablets the night before.
I’d made my feeds pretty fool proof for the guys to hand to me with a schedule drawn out on the boat and they didn’t miss a beat. I definitely had some moments of “what-the-hell-am-I-doing-here” but never any really low lows that i had to push through. The worse part was the start, I did have the tiny bit of doubt about how i’d handle the cold, but I knew if I made it to the first hour I’d be fine.
Cheers,
Neal