Night Swim

It was first suggested to us by Greg Whyte, the coach of David Walliams, that we should try to get in some swimming training at night in case we were required to swim at this time. To be honest, none of us had thought about this and a quick check of YouTube shows that quite a few swims have partially been completed in the dark. It therefore sounded like a very good idea to at least have a practice at this and gave me the excuse to buy lots of glowsticks!!

We met at The Marlow Club at 9pm with our support crew which consisted of my wife Jay, my Mum and Dad, and Jezz's wife Lisa. After a quick safety briefing which basically consisted of "watch out for boats", "don't shine your torches in our eyes" and "keep flashing your torch on and off if there is danger" we were ready to hit the water at our planned start time of 9:30pm.

We attached glow sticks to our behinds so that we could be seen and set for our normal swim which we had slighlty shortened to allow the support team on the bank to follow us. It was a lovely evening, still warm, and with little moonlight available it was pretty dark. When I put my tinted goggles on it got darker still and it felt a little unnatural to be in the river at this time. It also felt quite naughty too; as if we had broken into the hotel pool after opening hours - I'm sure you've all been there and understand where I'm coming from on this.

As soon as we started swimming we all noticed that it was extremely difficult to get our bearings which was evidenced by us bumping into each other all the way down the river. Heath came over to me and 'accidentally' bashed me over the head a few times dislodging my goggles so I had to stop and make some running repairs. I hope that Heath wasn't taking advantage of the dark to go around beating people up - you never know with these South Africans!!

After many mornings in the river not seeing a single motor boat I couldn't believe that we finally saw one in the dark! It crept past us with lights on giving us a wide berth. Pretty unsetttling but it passed without incident so all was well.

We finally made it to the danger sign and regrouped. The glowsticks were not working that well tied to our trunks as they became partially submersed and difficult to see. Jezz took action and altered his glowstick so that it was lodged under his goggle straps behind his head. This made Jezz a stand out beacon and we then all set off downstream following Jezz's orange glow. After about halfway down to the turnaround point we all stopped to regroup and adopted the glowstick on head stance which made things a lot easier.

At the final turnaround point we regrouped again before the final push to the end. When we regrouped we thought we heard a boat engine coming down the river but couldn't see anything so set off along the last stretch. A couple of minutes in and the flashlights on the bank were blinking and we stopped to hear shouts from the river bank of 'watch out for the boat' which was now approaching us. It appeared to be the same boat from earlier and we carefully watched as it went by and then carried on to the end. There was a fairly fast push by the group to the finish which is normal and no doubt caused by our extreme individual competitiveness!

I msut say that swimming under the stars on a hot summers night was a really unique way to spend and evening and I would certainly like to do it again. We all learned a fair bit about night swimming and feel a lot more comfortable if we have to swim at night for the actual channel swim.

Not long to go now, hope you like the photos!