Day & NIGHT Swim! Monday, 24th August

Here's a nice long post to update you on how our 2nd 'complete team' swim AND our first ever night swim went...very exciting.

We all rocked up at Swanpool around 6.30 for our first hour of swimming. I have never felt more part of a team! We set off from the beach in a line and stayed in perfect line formation and matching pace alllll the way out to sea, before turning round after 35 mins-ish and swimming back in. This formation may have involved a bit too much banging together of arms and legs (and was extremely squished at times for those in the middle of the line of four) but our matching pace made the swim feel incredibly easy and relaxed; it really hit me that we were all in this completely together (alas, to quote High School Musical).

Those of us wondering what had happened to Miss Bunt's pace (that is, all of us) and why she wasn't streaking off ahead as per usual were put at rest when we turned back for the second half hour - Luce decided she was done with being in the water and off she went at a zillion miles per hour, leaving us 3 to come back into the beach in a few minutes later!

Then it was onto the beach for a lovely bbq with Len, Didge and an Australian member of the Hatcher family. While the veggies previously mentioned munched on veggie kababs, the 4 Channel girls had a lovely meal of burgers and sausages and a bit of salad, followed by toasted marshmallows (complete with melted Galaxy smeared all over them!)! I can safely say that was one of the best bbqs I've had in ages.

Suddenly it was 9.30 and we were still sitting on the beach, a bit behind schedule for our night swim debut (and having eaten a few too many marshmallows). My mum arrived and we got changed back into our (unpleasantly wet) swimming cozzies, hats, gogs and earplugs and prepared for the night swim. An exciting addition to the usual kit was GLOWSTICKS which I had ordered online which we needed so that Len could see us from the boat. I dished out the different colour sticks to the swimmers and we each attached one to our hat and tied one round our waist so they showed up on our backs. After watching a random display of a few people juggling flaming sticks in the car park (I don't think anyone in the car park at that point was sane), we trooped into Len's boat (accompanied by my mum, who came along for the ride) and Len rowed us (sheave style) out to sea a few hundred metres.

We hopped into the pitch black sea from the boat in L.E.N.S. Team order, Lucy first and then me, and so on. This was a little scary but ended up being SO cool. The water wasn't too cold and we all got in quickly and fairly calmly (with the exception of Sarah, who had a mini panic attack after lowering herself in, but soon calmed down -haha). Once we were all in, we were off; our glowsticks glowing on the water the only visible part of us to Len, surveying us from the boat alongside. In the water, things were very exciting and you could see all the zillions of phosphorescent algae - basically, loads of little bright green glowing specks! I became strangely aware of not wanting to swallow any of these little glowing things, but apart from that I think we were all unexpectedly at ease, with the exception of a few screams when we first felt seaweed underneath us, and a group scream when we very suddenly arrived at the beach and had swum so far in without realising it that we actually swam onto the sand - bit of a shock to suddenly feel sand underneath you!

So, this was a pretty cool experience for all of us. We were luckily fairly undaunted by the dark once we'd gotten used to it; the glowsticks amused us to the point that our excitement at having our own individual sticks outstripped our nerves at swimming in water where you have no idea what's around or under you! So we can fortunately fairly decidedly confirm that the dark won't be an issue in the Channel - though the waves and cold still might!!

Em on behalf of L.E.N.S. Team xxx