4 minute read
Alumnus Daniel’s Brave Channel Swim
Deep Blue Sea
Last year, Daniel Shailer (2018 cohort) swam the 33 miles across the English Channel, raising more than $24,000 for the Marine Conservation Society in the process. Here, he takes us through the blood, sweat and stings of crossing the world’s busiest shipping lane
“Every year, a handful of pilot boats escort Channel swimmers off a beach near Dover ready for the long voyage to France.
If the swimmer is well prepared and (more importantly) lucky, the pilot boat will reach French inshore waters and push on towards the coast until, in the last few hundred metres, the sea floor becomes too shallow for the boat to travel any further. At this point, most boats stop to put out a smaller dinghy that will be rowed into shore alongside the exhausted swimmer. But though they may be exhausted, they are also euphoric: by this point they have reached rarefied water. Only one in five of the swimmers who walk off a beach in England will swim until they reach land in France.
After 14 hours in the water, I remember dotting the ‘i’s and crossing the ‘t’s on a mental list of excuses to give up. The list itself came easily; I had been drafting it in my head since 1am that morning. I had begun swimming in the darkness just before midnight and it was now around 2pm, though (forgivably, I think) I had long since lost track. The case for chucking in my challenge was, by this point, beginning to gain serious momentum and my list of reasons felt fool proof.
Suddenly, breathing to the right, I saw one of the two pilots, Harry, untying the dinghy from our boat, Masterpiece. I could have cried. If you ask my mum, I did. In one moment, the letter of resignation I had been writing myself was forgotten and I felt a surging rush of relief – it was over. A little more than an hour later and it really was all over; I found myself walking up a beach just west of Calais.
I was very lucky to have been able to take on this swim at all, let alone in a tumultuous and unpredictable 2020. When I’d started planning my adventure back in April 2019, I could not have anticipated that pools would be closed for more than half of my training period, due to a UK-wide lockdown. There were some positives to be found in the situation. Being sequestered on England’s Dorset coast meant I was able to start swimming in the sea earlier than I’d anticipated, and I gradually built up my tolerance to cold water with glacial showers and incrementally longer swims.
And as human activity on the coast dwindled for a time, I noticed a brief resurgence of local marine life. I have visited the same beach looking into Poole Harbour many times since childhood, but had never before seen seals bobbing off the shore until mid-lockdown. I swam with seals over weaving forests of kelp; I saw carbuncled spider crabs; there was a catalogue of jellyfish species; even, once, a solitary seahorse. In the spring of 2020, seahorses had been cropping up all along the coast in areas they hadn’t been recorded in for years.
While I had already begun fundraising for the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) by this stage, the experience reinforced to me just how high the stakes for protecting our ‘blue spaces’ are – and how much we stand to lose. MCS is the UK’s largest environmental society focused on conservation of coastal environments and I was proud to raise more than £13,000 [$24,000] with my swim to support their work. I’m hugely grateful to everyone who donated.
The support I had on the day of the swim, both over social media and on the boat, was also crucial. Without it, mine would have been a very different and altogether shorter story. My lasting memories of the day itself are of emotional extremes: from intense fear when I jumped into inky black water in the small hours of the morning, to the feeling of satisfaction and relief the other end; frustration at broken goggles and jellyfish stings, to the warmth and comfort of eating a burger in the bath when I arrived home. I remember hours of swimming in darkness before the sun rose just as well as I remember hugging my family on the boat once it was all over.
After the swim, I was very flattered to be picked by MCS as their Fundraiser of the Year and was awarded the Channel Swimming Association’s trophy for the most difficult conditions of the season. I’m equally thrilled that a friend from Dover combed through the records to find I was the 2105th person to swim the Channel – and the 10th Daniel. Perhaps most importantly, he discovered I was three minutes faster than the average Daniel!
I am currently in my third and final year of a degree in English Literature at Pembroke College, Cambridge. This year, I’ll be captaining the Cambridge Open Water team as we take on Oxford in our Varsity relay race across the Channel.
Despite further disruption to my degree due to the pandemic, I am looking forward to the opportunity to share wild swimming with the university community in the summer. I also have a couple of solo swims in the pipeline, including a swim across the Bristol Channel. While that might seem a little anticlimactic, it’s a challenge that (I hope) will fit more comfortably alongside my studies for finals!”
