Following the Swim

There won't be any blog updates during the swim. 

For updates and photos, James will be looking after the Twitter feed here:

https://twitter.com/Swim_Sydney

You don't need to log in or sign up to follow it, just click on the link.

And we'll have a live tracker on board so you can see our progress:

http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=06o4DOyB0Fqpq1YnQcqA9jMutW79rMNg4

This has been very kindly loaned to us by Tori Gorman, so it will say 'Tori's Tracker' in the column in the left. Thanks very much, Tori.

And if anyone feels this is worth a dollar or two to a good cause, the link to helping out the Inspire Foundation is here:

http://personalchallenge.gofundraise.com.au/page/SwimSydney

See you all on the other side, safe and sound, hopefully.

Palm Beach Start at Midday

Conditions are looking favourable for a north-south swim. We have a small SE swell running but all anecdotal evidence we can muster (lacking hard data) suggests there is a good north-south current running. We may have to head a way offshore to find it but swimming north would mean we'd have to hug the coast to avoid swimming against the current. Plus, the winds will be swinging round to the nor-east Saturday afternoon so we'll have them slightly behind us and hopefully giving us a good run down the northern beaches while I'm still fresh.

I've been lucky enough to have the expertise of Matt Hayes from Sydney by Sail on the team. Matt has done numerous Sydney to Hobarts so he knows a thing or two about currents (though I did stress that I'm built slightly differently from a maxi yacht and probably not equipped to head out to the continental shelf...)

The finish will be on Horderns Beach at Bundeena, near the ferry wharf, some time on Sunday morning. The hour goes back at 3am, so it will be groundhog day for the crew, while I remain completely oblivious. Hopefully we can benefit from this current and arrive some time mid-morning.

And yes, I'm nervous. The cold overnight, bluebottles, sharks, possibly in that order. Oh, and the 'chance of a thunderstorm' tomorrow afternoon. Lightning is never a good thing when you're swimming. 

Here's hoping it will all be.

Start Date Confirmed

After days of frantically scanning six different weather sites (which probably all get their information from the same source anyway) it's starting to look good.

Forecast is for a 1 metre SE swell, and light ESE winds during Saturday, freshening in the late afternoon & evening, before dropping off to calm overnight and possibly swinging round to the SW. They should swing SE again during Sunday morning and into the afternoon but I have most things crossed that I'll be finished by lunchtime.....

It's pointing towards a south to north swim, starting at Bundeena at midday and finishing at the northern end of Palm Beach. We're just waiting on confirmation about the currents. Our expert weather guru says that the warm water temperature (a crazy 24 degrees at the moment, not that I'm complaining) suggests a strong southbound current, in which case we may swap.

We'll make that call in the next couple of days.

I was so nervous about whether we were going to get to swim at all, and it feels fantastic that we're going to start. Finishing is another matter entirely, and a whole new set of nerves.....

Night Swimming

On Friday night we had our test swim in Botany Bay. We headed down to the boat ramp on Foreshore Road (well-lit, washdown facility and lots of lighting) at 7pm, with so much kit - ropes, lights, glow sticks..... This was a trial run to see what worked and what didn't, particularly with lighting.

We hit the water as planned, at about 8pm, although I hadn't twigged that there was an exclusion zone all around the runways (obviously!) and quite how long it would take to motor the IRB & the kayaks past it.

Eventually we cleared the runways and I hit the water. There was still a fair amount of ambient light, with the proximity to the container terminal, the airport and Sans Souci, but at least the bay was contained, with little swell and wind so that we could stop and fiddle with gear, as required.

Swimming near a runway, with planes taking off every 90 seconds possibly wasn't the best option for testing comms but at least we managed to give the radios a good workout. 

Lighting is now sorted and we know what we need. The shopping list for this week grows ever longer & I suggest buying some shares in a glow stick company.

Friday night's team included:

Paddlers: Collie, John, Anna & Martine
IRB wonderguy: Matt
Head logistics: James

Collie also supplied dinner & dessert too. Why wouldn't you want to eat chicken curry & cake at 12.30am on a public holiday in a car park? Everyone had so many ideas and plans on how to improve things that no one seemed in a hurry to get home. 

I have an amazing support crew.

The Inspire Foundation

Once again, I have chosen to support the Inspire Foundation and its work with teenagers and young adults with mental health issues and at risk of suicide.

I've set up a fundraising page and I really appreciate any dollars you can spare to send Inspire's way. Please click on the 'ReachOut.com' logo in the right column to head to the fundraising page.

A word or two from Inspire:

Inspire is delighted that Helen has chosen us as the benefactor of the donations she'll raise by undertaking this amazing challenge.

 

Like Helen when she was young, many young people go through a tough time and need help but don’t know where to go or who to talk to to get them through those ‘dark times’. Last year we helped over 640,000 young people in Australia with information and support from other young people just like them.

At Inspire we believe that all young people in Australia deserve to be happy and well and ReachOut.com will be able to support many more hundreds of young people to learn how to help themselves and help their friends through Helen’s challenge and her generous supporters.

We're Off!

I never did finish writing about last year's 24 hour swim. I think it was a little too painful to remember.

But now the next swim is almost upon us, the one that last year's swim at Homebush was training for.

In April, weather conditions dependent, I will be attempting to become the first person (that we know of) to "Swim Sydney": from Palm Beach in Sydney’s northern outskirts down to Bundeena at the southern tip of the city’s boundaries.

It is a distance of between 60km-65km, depending on how straight a line we make down the coast and is expected to take approximately 24-28 hours, depending on conditions.

Last night we had a planning meeting with the full support crew (minus one) together for the first time. There was an incredible energy in the room and I finally feel excited that it's all coming together.

There's still lots and lots to do but we have a first-rate team working on this now.

Stay tuned!

The Build-Up

It is now 8 weeks since I completed the 24 hour swim and it has taken me this long to write about it because I still find it difficult to reflect on it and think about it in any great detail. 

My only thought in the two or three days afterwards was: "It's done." All I felt (apart from pain) was relief. I thought perhaps this would pass and some sense of satisfaction and achievement would kick in at some point. But it hasn't by now so I guess it never will. And so I write about it.

When I told people what I was planning to do this year, they’d look at me quizzically and just ask, "Why?" And whilst I knew it was a training swim for the future, it needed to be a bit more in order to get my own brain engaged with it. I still never had a good answer to the question, though, and it proved a difficult swim to ever be excited by.

Week after week and month after month, I trained in chlorinated pools, giving up my regular salt water fix. The comfort I took from this was that I knew I was always going to get in a warm pool (helpful when getting up on those cold winter mornings) and I was never going to have to battle surf and bluebottles when training.

But all year, the swim loomed before me, providing none of the usual sense of excitement but filling me with fear instead and a terrible sense of claustrophobia. Maybe it was the fear of just swimming up and down for 24 hours with nowhere to go and no real purpose? On so many occasions I was ready to quit, as training swims left me in a panic. If I couldn’t swim for 15 minutes, how could I possibly swim for 24 hours? This was insane. And why was I putting myself through this? Doubly insane.

This is one of my favourite photos: 

Somewhere in between those two kayaks is a dot: 'me'. This photo was taken by James Goins during one of my training swims for the Channel. James had swum from Shelly Beach to Dee Why with me, with Millie & Margie on kayaks for support. James hopped out at Dee Why and took this picture from the cliff top of my return trip to Manly. I still look at this picture with a sense of wonder and disbelief. But most of all, this picture sums up everything I love about ocean swimming: the openness, the freedom, the escape from our ordinary, contained lives.

Swimming in a pool for 24 hours was the opposite of all the freedom this picture represents. 

The main reason for doing this swim at Homebush, though (apart from the chance to raise some money for a great cause) is that there is another long swim in the planning – back there, out in the wide ocean. So this provided me a safe environment in which to learn what it would be like to swim for 24 hours. I could get out when I wanted to, eat food on dry land, have a chat to friends along the way. The lights would be on all night, ensuring my body never felt like it was bedtime, and which would hopefully make swimming through the night easier. There were lots of things to learn on this swim and I had to focus on that whenever I questioned why I was doing it. 

So, I had put myself through all the training, and I was about to put myself through swimming for a whole day and night. What would it be like?