The great sea adventure is about to begin as Irish Life investment managers take to open seas, writes TOM HUMPHRIES
LITTLE TIP from an old sea dog. If you ever have a group of investment managers at your mercy and you are in a position to do with them as you will don’t come over all Abu Ghraib or Guantanomo. Use your head. Round them up. Work on them. Then make them swim the English Channel as part of a relay team.
Obviously if you have read the small print which comes with each investment manager, you will know the following: investment managers may under-perform over a period of time. The buoyancy of investment managers can fall as well as rise and you may not get back the full number of investment managers which you originally placed in the sea.
Past performance is not necessarily a guide to future performance with investment managers in choppy seas. Dealing with jelly fish and other marine life may not be suitable for all investment managers. You are interested now aren’t you?
Do not give in to their whimperings and permit them make a series of solo attempts. They may underperform but if they do so, their failure will be theirs and theirs alone. They can later claim to have been grazed by a torpedo, snacked on by a shark or to just have remembered half way there that they never really cared much for France anyway.
Make them work together. That way you get more of them swimming through the nauseating slicks of oil or diesel which stain the surface of one of the world’s busiest commercial shipping areas. (More than 600 tankers and 200 ferries and sea cats cross every day!)
Your portfolio of investment managers will bob satisfyingly up and down on the swells caused by passing ferries and commercial boats while the exhaust fumes pumping from their own little pilot boat will suffocate them. Oh, and there will be eels swimming underneath them. Occasionally you will enjoy the sight of an investment manager moving gingerly through great gatherings of irate jelly fish like a small fly stuck in a mound of mint sauce.
At no extra cost you will get the hidden extras – the sewage and the debris, the flotsam and the jetsom and also, ta da (!) those all-important tides and currents, forces of nature which have a will of their own.
And the coup de gras? The topper? The cherry on the cake? Between swims they have to sit cold and miserable and sea sick on what is basically a little trawler, a pilot boat which is subject to all the churnings of the channel but which necessarily can plod through the water at just the speed of the swimmer who is in the water at the time. If there is one thing worse than sitting cold and shivering and seasick and miserable for four hours on one of these little things, it is sitting cold and shivering and seasick and miserable for four hours on one of those little things and knowing that you have to get back into the water for an hour. Fiendish, isn’t it? So bad in fact that they would be more comfortable flying Ryanair.
Glenn Treacy, a nice man who should know better, got the idea while living and studying in London about 10 years ago. He came into contact with a man called Lewis Pugh.
Pugh! Wearing just his Speedos, his cap and his goggles, Pugh became the first person to swim around the infamous North Cape. Now the North Cape is the point where the Norwegian Sea meets the Barents Sea, which is part of the Arctic Ocean. Chances are Pugh is the first person to have ever even have thought of putting the words swimming and Arctic Ocean together in a sentence.
The same applies to being the first person to have swum down the entire length of Sognefjord in Norway, a 204km (127 mile) swim which took him 21 days to complete while declining all offers off lifts on both public and private transport. Two years ago Pugh completed a swim across an open patch of sea at the North Pole. He has the ability to raise his core body temperature in anticipation of entering cold water.
Pugh is an environmentalist and an extreme sports man or, in layman’s terms, barking mad.
Glenn Treacy liked the cut of his gib however and when Glenn noticed that morale was a bit poor around the office down at Irish Life Investment Management he, ahem, floated the idea, which had been in his brain for some time. Let’s go swim the channel, aw c’mon. It will be fun.
There was a surprisingly good uptake on the idea and strong support from management who may have viewed it as a radical Japanese form of redundancy.
There have been just two drop outs, one for medical reasons and one for time constraints, and right now 21 people, who like Glenn should really know better, are training like lunatics to become the first organisation or group to submit three relay teams at once to the joys of the channel.
Eh, did we mention that these are investment managers and software fondlers and that only three of these were strong swimmers to start with? And none of them has any experience of sea swimming or cold water swimming? And one is a monopoly champion? Hee hee.
And and, and well holy God, what the hell are these normally sensible people from Irish Life thinking of?
I mean Andrew MacClatchie, the fortysomething group property manager who describes himself as being “sedentary and a smoker” as if those were bad things. Or Fergus “Sharkbait” Dowd who just turned 50 and says he is swimming the channel because his mid-life crisis never stretched to a new sports car.
Or poor, poor Conor Murnane who noted that a spell of working in IT had made his limbs atrophy to the point where he felt he might get eaten by a short-sighted dog. Is that less dignified than being swallowed by a whale, Conor, Conor, Conor?
So they gathered together and spoke to a few people familiar with this maritime madness and then they started visiting the Irish Life staff pool. Catherine Fox, the lifeguard at the pool, noticed the increase in soft bellied seal pups sliding into her waters and asked a few questions. She asked Glenn could she be part of it. He said yes. So now Catherine is the unofficial coach and ass kicker when they go to the pool.
“Some of the weaker swimmers are some of the most determined,” she says. “It is great to see some people who six months ago would have written themselves off as swimmers. It’s about different people, some of them are very dogged and stubborn. Everyone is doing it for a different reason.”
Catherine is doing it for the challenge and because she knows four different friends undergoing chemotherapy at present. The project will raise money for the Irish Cancer Society. But she can swim and she can save people who have forgotten how to swim so she isn’t certifiable.
On the other hand, Glenn, the leader, is a landlubber. He looks as if he should have a warning printed on his person about the risks of placing him in cold water, how it invalidates all warranties, etc. A rail thin man without the insulating layer of homely fat that the old-style channel swimmers used to have, the cold will be his enemy. Somebody offered him a bleak thought recently – you’ll never get used to the cold; you will just get better at bearing it.
“I went into the Forty Foot one Saturday recently,” he recalls. “I had been in on Good Friday and lasted 90 seconds. The cold really affects me. I have a slight build so I have no advantages.
“On this Saturday I made it to three minutes and 40 seconds. Real progress. I found it easier because the water was quite rough. The tide was high and the water was spilling over onto the concrete steps. There was a bit of adrenalin. It is cold to the body but then when you put your head in, [he pauses] there is a feeling of shock!”
At home he has lain in a cold bath for 15 minutes just defying the cold. Pugh would be proud.
As for Catherine she is sensibly dubious of the cold.
“When we did the photo I wouldn’t put my ankle in and there were men swimming up and down in the sea. Last time I was in the sea was last summer in Wexford. For 10 minutes! I won’t be going in until June!”
Again. Catherine can swim. She seems sane!
Sometime in September, their slot will come up at one of the starting points near Dover or Folkestone. A pilot will be available to them for three days and when the right time comes, in other words when there is a benign neep tide they will be summoned. Leaving at just the right time is vital. A few minutes the wrong way could cost them hours in the sea.
The shortest distance to France from Shakespeare’s Cliff or Samphire Hoe – the traditional English starting points – is 21 miles but across the water on either side of Cap Gris-Nez, the French coastline drops away, so swimmers generally have further to go to make landfall as the current moves them from side to side and the tides ebb.
Between now and then they have a million things to do. Right now they are working on technique and endurance but when the Leinster Sea Swimming season starts in a few weeks, they aren’t so much in at the deep end as in to where there is no deep end.
They don’t know how the waves will affect their breathing, how the cold will hit their muscles, how the waves and the currents will slow them, how the feeling of not being able to see the end of the pool will hit them. Oh, and then some of them will have to learn how to swim in the dark.
Twenty investment managers and a lifeguard versus 21 miles of the busiest shipping lane in the world. Against a million jelly fish, against the cold, the sea sickness and the sewage. Cue that Jawsmusic. The great adventure begins here.
The ILIM Channel Swimmers will be contributing regular diaries to Healthplus. Meanwhile, anybody wishing to learn more about their progress or to contribute sponsorship can do so at http://IASC-swim.com