I got the call just after noon on Monday.
“So, Daniel, we’ve got a plan”
I’d been packed and waiting to swim for just over a week, which isn’t a long time in the scheme of things, but was beginning to drag after two false alarms already. Expecting a call any day meant team thumb twiddling and postponed plans. I’d started the previous Monday with a weather-chat-ban; why stress about what you can’t change? By Wednesday I had a wind app downloaded on my phone and by the weekend the whole crew was crowded around four different tabs predicting weather across the Channel. I’d been swimming every other day to keep things ticking over, without tiring myself out for a swim that could be any day. I took the weekend off, then (sod’s law) swam on Monday morning about an hour before I picked up the phone.
The “plan” didn’t sound stellar to me. Swimmers book for every other week during Summer to go out during weaker, neap tides, but last week had been a blow out so my only choice was a spring tide – which would mean a longer swim up and down the Channel perpendicular to my direction of travel. My pilot told me with great confidence that the “plan” also involved meeting in Folkestone harbour at 11pm, for a 12pm start in the water. I had never swum in the dark before.
Maybe it should have been a difficult decision. The wind forecast was touch and go, before markedly deteriorating into Tuesday afternoon. What’s more, Thursday looked like a dream: little to no swell and enough wind to turn the Channel into a mill pond. At the time it didn’t feel like a difficult decision. After so much waiting I was too excited to raise any questions let alone ask to wait till Thursday.
The bags were packed, so after a takeaway and quick panic forgetting which pizza was gluten free we started the drive down to Folkestone (the next town along from Dover on the coast, where about half the Channel pilot boats harbour). After another quick panic finding the slipway in the dark we met Jim, our observer, who ran through the rules. In brief:
1) don’t touch the boat (an immediate disqualification)
2) keep swimming.
Then we met Fred and Harry, our father and son pilot team for the swim, and their boat Masterpiece.
With all our kit for the swim onboard, it was a half hour ride on the boat out to Samphire Hoe, a beach between Dover and Folkestone. Harry gave us the ten minute warning so it was time to strip down; daylight seemed an impossible way off at that point, but my crew had the unenviable task of applying an optimistic layer of sun cream. An even less hotly contested role: getting Vaseline everywhere that might rub after twelve hours in salt water.
When we arrived it was very dark. So dark I couldn’t make out the English coast until Harry pointed it out. I was to jump in, swim to England, clear the water and wait for the boat’s horn at which point the swim would begin and I could wade back into the water. In the video below you can see a green light become clearer when I reach the beach, as the boat’s spotlight fights against the rocking swell to steady on me. I’d attached a pair of lights: one flashing to my goggles and a steady light from the back of my trunks, so the crew could see where I was and which way I was pointing in the darkness.
The first two hours were the worst. I breathe to the right, so swam on the left-hand side of the boat, watching it every four strokes. On Masterpiece the captain’s cabin is on the opposite side and I’d been told to keep a wide berth so Fred could see me from the helm. My heart was racing and from a distance I couldn’t see the glowsticks on the boat’s side, or anyone on the boat, just the blur of the main deck light. I kept a distance and tried to focus on calming down my breathing and settling into a rhythm. Every time I relaxed, it seemed like the boat was suddenly hundreds of metres away and I had to sprint back to it. When I think back, I realise I was starting to panic. I’d never swum with lights before – let alone at night – and in the darkness the green light pulsing at the side of my goggles seemed to be coming from inside my head. The swell felt larger than I knew it was and I felt the water churning like a washing machine beneath me. I found myself swimming with eyes closed to block out the light on my goggle and when I opened them the boat was pointing a different direction. I still couldn’t tell you exactly what happened but a few minutes later I turned to breathe and couldn’t see the boat.
The Start: less sunrise paradise, more Blair Witch Project
I stopped and looked around and all I could think over and over was ‘surely it hasn’t gone this wrong so early.’ Remembering now, I think in my disorientation I had confused the moonlight and its column of white reflected on the water with the white light of the boat. The boat started sounding its horn and flashing a spotlight and the distinction became clearer.
It was around this time a thought occurred which stayed with me for much of the swim. I was beginning to question with increasing urgency why anyone would put themselves through something like this. All of the dark thoughts that had been doing trial runs round my head in training came out in full force: I wouldn’t make it; I had been stupid to even try, let alone tell people; I hadn’t done the right training and without a coach I had gotten everything wrong. Worst of all, I just wasn’t good enough. Some people have it and it only took 90 minutes to work out I was not one of those people. Some people succeed and I would fail.
After indulging my own pity party for one for what felt like a long time I thought back to my plan for the swim. I thought about putting myself in the right position to make it across. Later, that might mean sprinting and pain killers and shouting and tears but for now all it meant was swimming until it became light. I just had to put myself in the right position. That thought made a very daunting swim seem a little more manageable.
In the blurry confusion, I missed my crew’s wave at the one-hour mark. By the time I made it to the end of two hours it felt like five and it was time for my first feed. For the whole swim I was drinking a mix of energy or electrolyte powders (‘feeding’) from half pint milk cartons connected with a carabiner to the end of a reel of brick line. We’d taped the cap to the cartoon with a piece of string and for these dark feeds also had a flashing light attached. After two hours straight swimming, I would feed hourly from then on, stopping to tread water for as little time as possible; the shared wisdom of Dover beach is that every minute feeding can add half an hour onto the end of a swim, making up the distance swept off course by the tides.
The next few hours of darkness passed quickly, until I could see the metal collars and corners of the boat picking up the pink glow of sunrise. I was breathing westwards, but it was encouraging to see the gradually lightened faces of my crew; after four hours I could begin to make out who was who: Mum leaning against the railing, Tilly sat on the boat’s table-cum-bench, and Dad’s head occasionally poking up from the deck under a beanie and sunglasses.
My goggles – which had held up through well over half a million metres – decided five and a half hours across the Channel was the perfect moment to pack up shop and become one with the sea . Luckily it was light enough to swap to my second tinted pair at the next feed.
I was starting to feel more confident after a rocky start and soon after six hours I swam through some floating rubbish: I had entered the Separation Zone between English and French shipping lanes. Roughly the half-way point between England and France, all things floating in the water are barged into the Separation Zone by the tankers and cargo ships that charge up and down the Channel. All things floating includes jellyfish and through the next hour I swam headfirst into my nastiest stings of the swim. I could see compass jellyfish passing beneath me – particularly malicious looking things with trailing red tentacles and an angry, yellow, frothy undercarriage. One tentacle landed smack on my face, trailing from cheek to cheek over the bridge of my nose; it slipped off and (painfully) onto my bottom lip, until I took a swipe and it slid off onto my shoulder. I’m sure the jellyfish will remember me from some choice words shared with the seabed.
From there it was smooth swimming to ten hours, via celebrations (some M&Ms and chopped up jelly babies) to mark a personal best at eight hours: the longest I had ever swum before. This was part of the plan – I knew I could swim eight hours from training, so I had now put myself in the right position to see if I had what it took. It felt like a very different swim to the crew on the boat; as I was patting myself on the back, Fred was telling them that it wasn’t clear when I would reach France (not twelve hours, but not sixteen). It was hard to communicate with the boat when I would only stop for 20-30 seconds each feed, but as things were looking up to me, the crew were biting their nails and looking into the distance.
At ten hours I began to see the seabed far below me. The water had become thick with sand churning in the water; the wind was starting to pick up but before long the floor was just out of reach. It beggared belief: a sub-12-hour time had been a distant dream since March when pools closed. Anywhere near twelve would have been a dream, but ten? Between breaths I asked my crew:
“are – we – shallow?”
From the water I could see worried looks and shaking heads. At the next feed I took a moment to look around me. For as much as I squinted and peered all I could see was blue-green swell – far in the distance and still just a faded outline, the French coast. I started swimming again and dipped my head to touch the floor. My hand went straight through and I realised for the last 20 minutes I had been hallucinating sand beneath me.
Watching the spiralling sand just beyond my fingertips was starting to remind me of the brightly coloured concoction of energy powders and tea swilling around my stomach, so I tried to close my eyes and focus on swimming. As I swam up to the twelve-hour mark it was safe to say my enthusiasm was starting to wear a little thin. I was looking up more often now and could see the tower on Cap Griz-Nez (the closest point of the France to England, peaking away from the coast). But hour after hour it wasn’t getting any closer. At this point on my track it looks like the pilot had a little too much to drink, as we suddenly veer East and up the coast. In fact, the tides were beginning to shift again: water moving up the Channel slingshots along the Cap and pushes away from the coast, leaving me swimming on a treadmill without getting any closer.
'You're not lying to me?': I knew this was a make or break part of the swim. I also knew Mum's optimism could sometimes express itself in selective truth-telling
At this point my shoulder was beginning to pack it in and time was starting to drag; it was time for a new plan. Fred told me to hug as close to the boat as possible – with the tide changing I couldn’t afford to lose my position like I had at the start of the swim. Mum and Tilly would tell me when half an hour had passed so I could start to break the last leg of the swim into chunks. The next hour I was in a lot of pain: I had messages on the whiteboard every 20 minutes now and broke those down in my head by counting strokes. I knew my cadence hovered around 50 strokes per minute, so I counted to a thousand strokes for each segment of the hour.
Seeing the French coast hover out of reach for hour on hour was running riot in my head. I had read so many stories of swimmers to make it across the Channel in all but name, falling short at the very last to capricious tides. Just two weeks before I had been recruited to the crew of a Dover trainee, Becky, who had made it close enough to see sail boats off the beaches but been pulled out after 15 hours. At the very start of the season another swimmer was three hundred yards away from the shore when she succumbed to hypothermia 18 hours in. My belief was starting to waiver; over the last few feeds I had begun to ask my crew if we would make it. Again, the atmosphere on the boat was different. Fred had just come up with a plan – as long as I stayed in the water, fast or slow, I would make it eventually. As I was eyeing up the ladder at the back of the boat, Mum and Tilly were celebrating, having decided they weren’t going to let me get out of the water. All I had to do was stay in, but I didn’t know that.
The next few moments, just approaching the end of my fourteenth hour of swimming, were easily my highlight of the whole journey – from booking a boat last April, to wintering in the Cam, to my last training swims off the beach in Dover. Just as I was convincing myself I was just about spent – that, on the day, I just didn’t have the Channel asked of me – I looked over to the boat and saw Fred pick up the dinghy. This meant one thing: it was over. The dinghy was going to guide me into shallower water which Masterpiece couldn’t safely reach. Without my realising we had swung around and entered a bay where the tides couldn’t take me any further. It was over and I started crying into my goggles. The relief in that moment, even as I was thinking up a list of excuses to explain why I hadn’t made it, was complete. The pinging pain in my shoulder dropped away; I stopped shivering and started gliding over the water with a deep, buzzing elation. Mum was watching then and later told me it looked like I was smiling in the water. I could see her smiling back. I only realised I needed to refocus when I could feel the drops pooling at the bottom of my goggles. It was over.
I thought it was over, until at the next feed my crew told me I had one hour left. It was frustrating at the time, but in hindsight it was exactly what I needed. The last hour felt long, but manageable; we swapped down to half hourly feeds and I swam very slowly but eventually Harry got the dinghy out for real. He rowed in front of me for the last 15 minutes, until I could stand, walk out of the water and take a knee to catch my breath. We’d drifted further along the coast than beach goers expect to see swimmers wash up so I got a few bemused looks. I remember a band was playing at the other end – at least, I don’t think I imagined that.
With a collection of pebbles Harry rowed me back to the boat. Out of the water I was shivering badly so I dried off and Mum and Tilly helped my numb fingers into dry clothes as quickly as possible. When it was time to celebrate, I was already fast asleep. It was the best part of four hours on Masterpiece back to Folkestone and I woke up an hour later shivering, soaked through with splash, but with Mum keeping me warm.
Walking up the beach in France was not how I had imagined it. Tom Gregory put it best after he became the youngest person to swim the Channel in 1988, aged just eleven:
‘The moment of acquiring a world record as I had imagined it was, in the event, very different. In my daydream I stepped out of the water confidently in my Speedos, waving and smiling at the cameras, exchanging hugs with the girl I had the biggest crush on at the time – normally Miss Piggy.’
I hadn’t imagined Gregory’s press junket, but I had practised walking up the beach in Dover after long swims saying over in my head: ‘make it look easy.’ We’d packed to celebrate with a bottle of bubbly amongst the energy powders and Vaseline (my crew had even packed a secret Guinness for me).
‘In the real world, there was no music. No hugs. No smiling. Just me, sitting on the pebbles. I had been through something terrible that had finally ended, and felt only a deep and extreme sense of relief.’
When Tilly asked me how I was feeling back on the boat I was honest. ‘Terrible. Tilly, never let me do anything like this again.’ Which begs a big question. It’s the first one people ask when I told them about the swim and one I’d been asking myself every training swim.
Why do something like this?
Some things are fun while you do them, like riding a rollercoaster, but aren’t that fun to remember and the memory of them fades quickly. At times while I was doing it, my Channel swim was not much fun – I spent the last five hours pretty ardently wishing it was over. But already it's fun to think back on. Back home six hours later, and once I'd finally stopped shivering, I knew: this was an experience I'd always hold close to my heart.
Those dark thoughts in the dark hours of the swim were, of course, not true. There is no such thing as winners and losers, just those who have prepared well enough and, more importantly, who are lucky on the day. I was able to train right because of the advice of so many other swimmers, but also because I am privileged enough to have been in a position to train: near the sea, with supportive parents and without responsibilities that could take me away from focussing entirely on the swim for the last few months.
I couldn’t have made it without all the swimmers who've helped me along the way, from Ed, Simon and Bertie right at the start to Julian, Len, Chris and the whole team at Dover (Emma, Paul, Donna and a great team of swimmers). Thank you also to Fred and Harry, who knew exactly what to do during the pivotal moments of the swim. I promise, they could not have taken a ‘straight line’. There also isn’t a better man on the planet to have in your corner than my old swim coach, Will. My attendance at the pool was never better than sporadic back then, but I’m excited to cook up the next adventure with him.
Countless groups of swimmers across the UK are only one reason why Marine Environments are so important to protect. From the river Cam to St Ives to Dover itself, I’ve met people for whom swimming in natural spaces is a lifeline: a real source of community, friendship and physical and mental wellbeing. They are just one reason I am very proud to have raised over £11,000 for MCS. I’m looking forward to a run down of all the projects your donations have helped MCS work on. Thank you all again.
Finally, its probably clear from the above what a different story my swim would’ve been without my crew. Earlier in the year there were stressful decisions to make when it looked like social distancing might limit the number of people on the boat. At the end of the day, the crew couldn’t have been better and were exactly what I needed to get the job done. Thank you, Mum, Tilly and Dad.
The team: Tilly, Mum, Observer Jim, Fred, Harry and Dad working hard
I feel very proud of my swim and the money we have raised together for MCS. I also feel very humbled. Unlike other competitive sports or endurance events, there is little feeling of having beaten another team or “conquered” a mountain on its summit. Looking back across the Channel I was filled with awe for something much greater and much stronger. A far cry from the sense of control we like to exert over natural spaces, Channel crossing felt like a particularly gruelling version of the arcade game where some hapless animal crosses the road against oncoming traffic. If I could be said to have beaten anything it was only myself and, paradoxically, I had only achieved that self-submission with the help of those around me. I was first attracted to the swim for the sort of inner, mental strength it seemed to require. In the process, my greatest learning was probably the limits of that kind of fetishized toughness. At my most resilient, mentally and physically, I was only strong through others and still only just strong enough to squeeze over line against a deep, churning, monumental mass of water, swinging up and down the Channel