I have been subject to some teasing this season. It seems that I have developed a reputation of finishing more relays than perhaps statistics would suggest that I should have.

There may be some truth in that.

This banter then went on to suggest that I had ‘rigged’ a few swims by suggesting last minute swim order changes which led to me being the one to land it, and generally only by a few minutes.

There may be some truth in that too, one relay I needed to change swim order in order to attend a work meeting from the boat!

There has even been some banter suggesting that maybe I had an app for working out the ideal swim order for any given team on any given day - this made me chuckle more than most suggestions. I really wish that I was that clever!!

The banter wasn’t confined to the beach either, it made its way to social media….

The truth of it was that I did land the first relay this year but I didn’t land the second or third.

But this banter was fun, so I decided to own it and the idea for new team was born! If we had A boat full of Emmas then Emma would be guaranteed to land it. The search began……

Clearly I started with some of the trouble makers Julian Emma Critchlow and Nick Emma Murch. Neither Nick or is better half Nichola were available but Julian was.

Next up was Jon Emma Southey who had missed out on our DCT SLT relay a few weeks ago as he as on standby for his own solo. Jon was in.

After that I wanted to pick some from the DCT class of 2021. This was tricky as there are literally hundreds to choose from. I restricted my choice to those who had already swum or were not training for a 2021 solo, as the focus for those still training should rightly be on their own swim. The team became:

Emma France
Julian Emma Critchlow
Jon Emma Southey
Steven ‘Slip’ Emma Boyle
Patrick Emma Tschorn
Kristen Emma Smith

The team was born. One of the only good things about COVID-19 is that there have been cancellations and I managed to get a slot for the spring tide starting 6th September with Stuart Gleeson.

Joan Metcalfe sent a surprise gift of team t-shirts - awesome! Thank you Joan.

The team

Let me properly introduce you to the team in the order that we swam.

Morning or night?

Not a great place to start with my body battery pretty depleted!

August had been a very challenging month for weather, very few swims went ahead and there was quite a backlog of swimmers. Our tide started on Monday 6th September and the forecast looked great, then it didn’t, then it did.

It became clear that there’d be no Dovercoaster for this swim, we’d be lucky and go on the first day of the tide.

In the last days of the tide, the pilots were trying to squeeze as much of the backlog in as possible, and then the weather turned for the worse. One swimmer from Brazil had been waiting for several weeks and had to return home on Monday 6th. It was Sunday or never for him. The plan would be that he would start his swim late on Saturday night and we would start 11pm Sunday night.

The weather wasn’t good enough to start then for him. Instead it would be a Sunday morning start, still enough time to get to the airport for his flight. He was a fast swimmer so maybe we would still be able to go on Sunday night if Stuart did a quick turnaround.

The conditions at the beginning of the day weren’t great and so he wasn’t as fast as he might otherwise have been. It was going to be close. If he made it there was a chance it would be too late for us to start, but if, heaven forbid, he didn’t make it we would be able to start.

As much as we wanted a night start rather than a daylight start, we really wanted him to be successful, so we watched with interest and had multiple updates from Stuart. For those of us already in Dover it wasn’t too much of an issue, we just needed to decide if / where we’d sleep. Kristen came from London and would need to decide when to leave. Julian & Patrick would need to drive from Sevenoaks. Leave too soon and there’s a risk they’d need to go back home. But if they left it too late and if Stuart did make it back in time and we wouldn’t be ready to go! Tricky.

Ideally, at this point we’d be sleeping, ready for a long night ahead. But we couldn’t. We needed to be available to speak to Stuart and to be ready for either starting at night or in the morning.

Jon, Steve, Paul & I went out for dinner while we waited for the news.

The swimmer made it - AMAZING! We were so pleased for him. It was going to be tight, but we were on for a night start. Stuart would take 3 hours to get back, there’d be no turning off the engine, one group off, our team on and we’d be off.

Back to the hotel and we had enough time for about an hour’s lie down before heading to the marina, I didn’t sleep. I’m getting too old to pull all-nighters, especially after a busy weekend running training on the beach. My body battery (a feature on my Garmin watch that shows me when I might be overdoing it, and rest is in order) was pretty depleted at only 18% as we stepped on the boat. Definitely not ideal.

And we’re on our way

Round one - the dark half

30 minutes into Steven’s swim, he was made great progress and was catching the pack that set off before us.

Steve swam the short distance to shore and cleared the water, turned around and raised his hands. A small sight lit up by spotlights from the boat. As soon as he raised his arms, the horn sounded and we were off. We started at 11:10pm. Next stop, France!

Steve swam up to the boat and alongside the starboard side. He settled in and started reeling the other swimmers in.

For the first few hours I took a screenshot of our position so that we could see how we were doing compared to the whole pack.

I don’t like getting cold, I’m not a fan of swimming in the dark, and I like to ensure I have access to food. All are a bit odd given all that I’ve already achieved, but there you go, emotions don’t always have logic.

To manage these fears I had plenty of food, enough to share, and load of layers. I was wearing quite a few of these layers when we arrived at the boat and I really didn’t need to as the air was surprisingly warm, at least to start with. I found myself ditching layers.

Steven also has a reputation for not liking the cold and he came out after giving it everything for an hour saying that the water was warm, almost too warm!

I had bought some gloves that light up so that we could give signs to signify 10 minutes to go and then 5 minutes to go - they worked well!

Just before the end of Patrick’s swim, we were making our way through the pack now.

Patrick was next up and he was super fast. So fast that he swam his way out of his swimming hat in the last 10 minutes!

We were making our way through the pack quite nicely. No longer the last in the pack.

Next up was Kristen who got on with the job in hand with no fuss. Kristen took us into the first shipping lane.

Then it was Jon, same, nice and close to the boat and swam a strong first swim.

In that last hour before my swim the air temperature started to drop. I wanted to put some of my layers back on, but decided not to as it would mean even more layers and warmth to be removed in a short while. It was also in that hour that I felt the effect of not sleeping. I became seriously tired. All I wanted to do was sleep. I knew that as soon as I hit the water that I’d be wide awake, but now I was tired.

This is what Garmin made of my first swim. You can see from my rapid change in heart rate that I did put quite a bit of effort in. No mega inflated distances for me on this swim as I was swimming into slack water.

Now it was my turn. Swimming in the dark, my least favourite thing, but that’s what was the order of the day. I prefer to swim on the port side, but decided to go the same side as everyone else for simplicity. It’s just a little harder to relax, so with hindsight, I should have switched sides. The water felt warm enough and time disappeared at about the right pace. The conditions were good and all was well. I still didn’t particularly enjoy it and in those moments I was happy that I don’t have any long swims planned in the future! What was nice was that occasionally I could see what I thought were stars in the night sky. Pretty!

Perception of distance can be a funny thing, particularly in the dark. We had overtaken Viking Princess II who were also on a relay. They started to gain with us again. I can only assume that their fast swimmers were not in at the same time as our fast swimmers. As I swam I saw what looked like Viking Princess II really close behind us, but then with another wave it looked like they were a long way behind and over a hill. I don’t think they were ever as close as they seemed.

I was too busy to get a screenshot whilst I swam, so this is Julian after 35 minutes.

After me was Julian finishing off the first round. He also swam well, taking us into the separation zone.

Round one done, all in the dark. Ding ding, round two!

Round Two and into the light

Sunrise on this swim was 06:16.

Steven’s second swim would start at 05:10, so whilst he wouldn’t have the joy of sunrise, he would see the sky lightening and that too is pretty magical. I love how it goes from a pure, dark black, to a dark inky blue and slowly, slowly gets lighter and lighter until you know that sunrise will be there at any moment.

Steven definitely drew the short straw though, with two night swims.

Patrick had the joy of sunrise (with a new swim hat on). It was a stunning sunrise.

With sunrise came the sights of migrant boats. I’ve done a lot of relays, and this was my 4th for the year, but this was the first time I’d seen a migrant boat and we sadly saw loads. We later found out that 1,000 migrants had made a crossing that day.

After Patrick was Kristen everyone continued to swim very well.

Next was Jon and he had the pictures of the day - the infamous ZC2 buoy and also a migrant boat (it’s usually a ferry or container ship, this was very 2020s). The first picture the migrant boat looks like a tiny spec. The next picture is zoomed in and shows how packed it was.

Back to me again. At this point land was firmly in sight and looked tantalisingly close, but I’ve been here before I knew that it really wasn’t. I could see where we were on the tracker and although I would give my swim absolutely everything to land it, I thought that Julian or Steven would finish the swim.

Julian gave me a motivational boost as I prepared to get in which went something along the lines of ‘give it everything and get close but not too close, close enough that I only have 5 minutes to do!’ Funny, Julian, funny!

Well I gave it my all and whilst we got closer, it wasn’t going to be me who finished the swim today.

As we got closer to France I started seeing some HUUUUGE barrel jellyfish. Barrel jellies don’t sting or hurt but they are huge. I pride myself in never breaking my stroke for anything during my swims, but when I punched a barrel jelly and it felt as hard as, say, a seal, my arm did recoil for a moment!

It was at about this point that I could see Julian changed and ready to go and standing at the back of the boat giving what looked to be some sort of speech.

This was his speech! Motivational to the last!

Wouldn’t it have been funny if Julian didn’t land it?!!

He certainly had to work for it, but after 55 minutes of swimming, Julian managed to clamber out on the rocks at Cap gris Nez. Our total time was 11 hours 55 minutes.

This was my 3rd fastest relay and fastest relay this year (so far).

A fabulous team and a great fun day.

Fundraising fun

For those who have been following along in the last few relays will have seen the fundraising challenge where you get to guess the following facts:

Which grid reference we would land at? (answer was 7 for this one)
What our final swim time would be (11hrs 55mins)
Which swimmer would land it? (#6)
Would it be Emma that landed it? (No)

We had a few guesses. Barnaby guessed the right landing grid. Hayley was only 29 minutes out on the time and one person out on the order. Kev was only five minutes from guessing the right swimmer.

No one managed 2 correct guesses on this one, so the prizes remain safe! Come on team, you have one more chance this season I would love to give prizes away!

It’s all for a fantastic cause MENCAP.

To give you the best possible chance, here are some stats from the other 19 relays (2005 to 2021):

Fastest relay: 9hrs 40mins (#1 2005)
Longest relay: 19hrs 32mins (#9 2016)
Average relay: 14hrs 18mins
The number of swims that I should have landed: 4.18
The number of swims that I have landed: 6
Grid numbers that I’ve landed in: 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 18, 24, 25, 30. 32% have landed in grid #7.

Good luck!!!

English Channel Relay - A boat full of Emmas!