Congratulations Adie for your successful North Channel swim here is a Adies report of how the swim went.
I was incredibly lucky with the weather on the day of my North Channel attempt; very little breeze and the water was like a millpond. I started out at 4.30am, just before first light, in order to get a good start on the tide. However, this brought with it the downside of not being able to see the jellyfish which were near the surface. The first hour was therefore quite uncomfortable, swimming blindly into blooms of jellyfish and I inherited multiple stings on my arms and legs. Each individual sting is about as painful as being badly nettled, but collectively they can, and did, cause me significant problems later in the swim.
The pain of the stings was mitigated by the temperature of the water which for the first 3 to 4 hours was in the region of 12.6 degrees C (or the Guernsey sea temperature in early May if that makes more sense). The water temperature in turn became a bit of a problem and at about 4 hours in, I seriously considered getting out as I felt frozen and my legs were shivering uncontrollably. However, I managed to swim through that rough patch and carry on for a few hours, aided by an increase in the water temperature during the middle part of the swim up to a balmy 16.0 degrees C. We made great progress between hours 4 and 12 and I was having a wonderful swim supported by an excellent crew who made sure that I got the high-energy food I needed on time and at the required temperature. Unfortunately, the jellyfish stings were about as persistant as I was over this period!
After about 12 hours my performance began to deteriorate as both hypothermia and the effect of the jellyfish toxins took their toll; the water temperature began to drop again as we approached Scotland. At around 13 hours it became apparent that I wasn’t able to take a full breath and my hands began to claw-up as the muscles in my fingers began to cramp. By this stage we were within a short distance of the Scottish coast and were being pushed northwards by the tide. There then followed the most stressful part of the swim, because I had absolutely nothing left, was only filling a fraction of my lungs with each breath and was swimming on auto-pilot with much of my higher brain functions switched off. There are large parts of the later stages of this swim that I simply don’t remember. My crew on the other hand knew that I had to make the last push to the shore before we hit the PortPatrick lighthouse, or I wouldn’t complete the swim, as the coast falls away at that point and this would add another mile and a half to the swim. Despite much emphatic cajoling by my crew I didn’t make landfall before or at the PortPatrick lighthouse. However the skipper of the support boat noticed a small patch of slack water just after the lighthouse. The skipper positioned his boat on the edge of this slack water and said to my crew “if he can’t swim the 10 yards around the front of the boat now, the swim is over”. Somehow, my crew managed to impress the urgency of this final push on my near comatose form and I made it around the front of the boat and into the slack water. At the death, a 24 mile swim had come down to 10 yards! Once in the slack water I made relatively quick progress to the shore and completed the swim in 14 hours 13 minutes.
Once back on the support boat I passed out for the 3 hour trip back to the harbour and was then transferred to Ulster Hospital as I still had trouble breathing. After 3 days in the care of Ulster Hospital I was discharged, managed to have a single celebratory pint of Guinness and then returned to Guernsey. My chest X ray taken in hospital showed that I had all the symptoms of pneumonia, so at the moment I’m walking around with all the energy of a 100 year old!
I would not have been able to contemplate, let alone complete, this challenging swim without the support of the Guernsey Swimming Club. The Club has gone above and beyond the call of duty for me this year and I owe the Club a debt of gratitude.
Best regards
Adrian Sarchet
