All at sea, just the way he likes it

SWIMMING: Seán Kennymeets up with Kevin Murphy, veteran of 34 English Channel swims, as he gets ready to tackle Dingle Bay, 15 miles of Atlantic swell and spray never before crossed by a single swimmer

Not that he makes a point of introducing himself to strangers as such, but Kevin Murphy is the King of the Channel.

The title is official, having the imprimatur of the Channel Swimming and Piloting Federation, which ratifies English Channel swims. It recognises his 34 swims across the 21-mile stretch of water. Once more with feeling, that's 34 swims across the Channel. Others make the swim their Everest. For Murphy, it is more like an annual pilgrimage. There are creatures with gills less familiar with the dark, frigid, rolling contours of that sea.

To break up the Channel routine, he swims across other inhospitable bodies of water. This summer, it's Dingle Bay: 15 miles of Atlantic swell and spray that have never been traversed by a single swimmer.

The Londoner will make the crossing on the day when conditions are most favourable, between July 21st and July 28th.

You do a little genealogical probing and find that Murphy (there's a clue in the name) has Irish roots. His forebears left Ireland for London during the Famine.

He wears his heritage lightly, but feels a certain affinity with the Dingle swim, off Munster, land of the Murphys.

The idea for Dingle started last summer, when he took part in an event off the Cork coast. Ned Dennison, a local sea-swimming institution, tossed out a suggestion: "Why not try Dingle Bay?"

"I looked at it and it had an attraction for me. My ancestry is Irish. And it hasn't been done before; it's an inaugural swim. I like doing things like that. I'll just keep going until I hit the other side, if it's eight hours or 12 hours or 20 hours."

Ireland's Atlantic waters are not noted for their hospitality at the best of times, and he knows, in this summer of low pressure, they could be in tantrum-throwing form.

"I think it's going to be quite rough. The rollers have had 3,000 miles to develop; that'll give it extra spice. On the other hand, there's a long swell, which makes it easier to get up and down.

"Every swim has its difficulties. If it were easy I wouldn't want to do it. My expectation is that, with the rising sea, I'll go up and be looking down on the escort boat one moment and then go down and be looking up at it the next."

The image is graphic, faintly sinister, but is delivered in an utterly phlegmatic tone.

Murphy is 58 now and has been long-distance swimming for over 40 years.

It is not glib to say he has been there, swum that.

The four-decade sea-swimming career is storied. There is a book in it, but a potted newsprint history would go something like this: He was, by his own admission, a mediocre sprint swimmer growing up. Other kids were faster, defter in the pool. He finished races in second, third, fourth. Then he noticed something. Long after others' youthful energy was spent, Murphy kept going.

His gift was for endurance, and it bore him beyond the confines of the pool and into open water. He had found his niche. First it was lakes. The niche grew and took on the form of the English Channel.

He recalls his first Channel swim, aged 19, in 1968. Butterflies by the shore. Fifteen hours and 15 minutes of front crawl.

"You stand on the shore and you feel nervous. You feel a certain fear of it, but it's part of the magic, overcoming all that and overcoming all the odds.

"That's why you do it.

"It was daunting, but there was a certain innocence then. I didn't quite know what I was letting myself in for. It was a new experience and might not have been quite so psychologically demanding as later swims."

Some compulsion took hold of him. He could not shake it off. Didn't want to. Kevin Murphy began to eye up and covet bodies of water the way others browse chain-store catalogues.

"I was in college in Portsmouth, on the south coast of England. I looked out and saw the Isle of Wight and thought, 'I wonder if I could swim around that?'"

His first attempt, in 1969, to circumnavigate the island's 56-mile coastline failed.

The following year he succeeded, becoming the first person to do so, in a time of 26 hours 51 minutes.

"That set me up and I did the two-way Channel in 1970 (the first time this had been achieved by a British person).

"Having done that, I thought, 'I wonder if I could do this three ways?' At that stage, nobody ever had."

They said the three-way Channel swim (63 miles) was undoable. They said the very idea was preposterous. They might as well have sent him a gilded invitation.

He had been in the water for 52 hours and 30 minutes and was halfway through the third leg when a weather front outpaced him; the attempt had to be abandoned.

He kept trying for a three-way crossing until the early 1990s, completing three two-way Channel swims, but never quite managing a third leg. Each failed attempt brought him back to square one. It was a Sisyphean task.

The effort became psychologically ruinous and he decided to broaden his scope.

He swam Loch Ness. Round Manhattan Island and Alcatraz ("only a mile and a half, but I couldn't resist the cachet").

He swam the North Channel, where the water is savagely cold and the jellyfish, called lion's manes, are even worse. He did it three times and the stinging was so bad and so relentless he had to be sedated on leaving the water each time.

He swam Lake Tahoe in California, an inland sea so bereft of buoyancy the local Indians say dead men do not rise to its surface.

He describes it as a release. In his day job, Murphy is a radio reporter with IRN, a branch of ITN. He has covered Iraq, Bosnia, the North, September 11th. Big, bad stories. He escapes into swimming.

"It's a bit of a drug. It's an obsession, but it's also my release. I've got a huge amount of stress in my job. I could release that stress down the pub, but this is what I choose to do. I substitute one lot of stresses in work for another lot of stresses in swimming. It's so all-consuming it takes your mind off everything else."

Back to Dingle. "I've trained for this as if it were a Channel swim, in exactly the same way. I've done training weekends in Dover harbour, a six-hour swim on the Saturday, another six hours on the Sunday.

"It can get quite choppy there, like a washing machine, and it's quite cold, but you can always swim there.

"Other like-minded eccentrics also train there, mostly to swim the Channel. There can be up to 70 people in the water. You'd need lanes."

The psychology of it is paramount. Stamina, fitness, training take the long-distance swimmer so far. If there is a shortfall, it is often mental.

"It's as psychologically draining as it is physically. I seem to be able to go into some sort of zone where I just switch off. It's a semi-conscious state, basically. It gets to a stage where the suffering doesn't mean anything any more; it just anaesthetises itself.

"When I think about anything, it's, 'What the hell am I doing here? How did I let myself in for this and how can I get out?'"

He chuckles at the madness of it, but the urge is chronic and he won't be giving up any time soon.

His wife, Jane, will accompany him to Dingle. Along with local woman Nuala Moore, herself an accomplished sea swimmer who participated in last summer's Round Ireland Swim, she will be on the escort boat. Eddie Moore, a fisherman and Nuala's brother, will pilot. They are people Kevin can trust and that is important.

"You need somebody on the boat who is aware of how far to push you. I might be in a bad way, and if I am I've got to have somebody there who knows you can push me a bit more, or, no, this is the time to get out. As a swimmer the senses are totally dulled."

He tells a story about a young woman whose Channel attempt he was observing a few years back. The girl began acting strangely in the water. Against her will, he pulled her out.

She was punch-drunk on sea water and in the incipient stages of drowning. She spent five days in hospital. Then the denouement: she successfully swam the Channel a few weeks later. Such is the compulsion.

In 2004, he had major surgery to repair his rotator cuffs, the muscles linking shoulder to arm, wrecked after 40 years ploughing through swell. His left shoulder is now held together by a piece of pig's tissue, placed there by his surgeon.

The shoulder, he says, has never felt better. "Sounds crazy, doesn't it?"

In general, the pain gets worse as he gets older, though. For now, Dingle Bay awaits. He talks about hobbling down the beach on a Zimmer frame some day.

He might only be half joking.