AN IRISH swimming champion joined an elite club yesterday upon completing the English Channel crossing after 18 hours and 52 minutes in the water.
Prior to the attempt, Ger Carty (42) had wound up a gruelling training schedule in preparation for the endurance test, clocking up some 750km in pool and ocean swims since January for what is often called the aquatic Everest.
Channel hopefuls must satisfy the Channel Swimming Association as to their stamina by completing six-hour spins in water of less than 16 degrees.
“You don’t think about the dangers. If you were to dwell on them you’d never undertake the crossing,” says Carty, who tackled the channel in aid of cancer research. The Dublin City Council sports development officer won the prestigious Rathlin Island to Ballycastle event in 2008, and compares sea swimming at its most fraught to making headway in a “washing machine with ice stuck to your forehead”.
Open water athlete Sorcha Barry (29) also completed the marathon crossing on Thursday after 12 hours 2 minutes in the water. The National Rehabilitation Hospital physiotherapist and fundraiser recently became the first woman to complete the 26km Galway Bay double traverse. She readily admits to being “spooked by seals that pop up real close, like big black dogs”.
Barry is one of an increasing number of women attracted to the gruelling sport, according to Irish Long Distance Swimming Association chairman Stephen Millar: “Open water events are growing in popularity among women because it’s not simply about being the fastest.” Millar condenses the characteristics which define the ocean athlete: courage, endurance and above all, “guts”.
The distance from Shakespeare Beach, Dover, to Cap Gris-Nez near Calais is some 34km. The extended swim is not for the faint-hearted as numerous dangers await: hypothermia, jellyfish, cramp, raw sewage and up to 400 ship crossings daily. The most feared factor is the “S” flowing current, which can push an athlete miles off course unless energy is held for the “shore sprint”.
Anne Marie Ward (45), an association member, was honoured in New York this summer as World Open Water Swimming Woman of the Year 2010. The HSE West disability services manager from Donegal swam the North Channel from Northern Ireland to Scotland – a 35km span completed by only 13 swimmers since 1947 – at the fourth attempt.
She is also an English Channel veteran, having crossed it in 2007 despite the treacherous conditions. Her crew in the pilot boat “knew I wouldn’t freak”, she said. Sub-surface propeller noise was an eerie background echo during the swim and the backwash often “knocked me off my stride”.
To mark a particularly courageous traverse which finished in a force five gale, the Channel Swimming Association awarded her the Pierre Von Vooren Memorial Trophy for a 20-hour swim in the most arduous conditions.
The English Channel, an unpredictable strait, is replete with perils where open water athletes meet a challenge seductive and fearsome in equal measure.