What a scorcher that was!

Wow, what a searingly hot weekend that was. It was a real test of all our COVID-19 adaptations. Could we handle training on a blisteringly hot weekend that would attract people to the beach?

Yes, the beach was busy, particularly in the early afternoon, and I could show you photos with angles that would make it look like people weren’t adhering to social distancing guidelines. Perhaps even that was true for other sections of the harbour, but swimmers beach whilst busier was ok. The trickiest bit was the first few metres in the water where there were kids (and adults), playing the water and cooling off. This simply confirmed my previous belief that the riskiest place this year was on the beach, in the shallows and not in the water where we actually swim.

As we’ve now had several opportunities to practice COVID-19 safe deep water feeding, we were able to do that, removing the need for those swimming for many hours to come into the beach to feed. That meant the all swimmers only had to pass through the busy stretch once on the way in and once on the way out. With lower numbers by design, that made it possible to do that safely.

For those who haven’t seen how our COVID-19 deep water feeding works, each swimmer has their own bottle which is surface sanitised after each contact (i.e. each feeding cycle). Between sessions they are dishwasher cleaned. The bottles are each attached to a rope and no contact is required to obtain the feed. Each numbered bottle has a place so no fumbling around for the right bottle with unnecessary contact. Each swimmers’ number is radioed into the beach to be marked off as fed on the new app. Whilst that is not a process that is scalable to our usual 50 swimmers, it is suitable to the number of swimmers that we have in this COVID-19 world.

DOVER SWIMS

Saturday:

Swimmers: 13 (over 3 start times)
Water temperature: 19.6
Air temperature: 31.4C
Conditions: Partial cloud, hot & humid. F1 NE, water flat.

Sunday:
Swimmers: 13 (over 2 start times)
Water temperature: 19.6C
Air temperature: 33C
Conditions: Initially flat NNE 3. Sunny, blue sky, roasting on the beach. Wind increased to F4 gusting 5. Water choppy.

Quick facts:

19 swimmers joining the longer swims.
We had 7 swimmers swim both days
Well done to David Williams on his back to back 7 & 6 and to Mark Kennealy on his back to back 6s.
It was lovely to welcome back some swimmers from previous years as well as our regulars
We also welcomed back some of our regular ‘virtual’ swimmers
And met 5 new swimmers

CHANNEL SWIMMER ON THE BEACH

We had more exciting tracking days this week, with back to back successes:

11 new soloists
11 new relay teams

Amongst them we saw:

Chloe McCardel complete two crossings, taking her to 34 crossings and equalling Kevin Murphy’s number and target to do one more this season to surpass that record. That would put her in #2 position, with only Alison Streeter to catch!
No fewer than 5 Aspire teams getting across! Including Chris Lovett who’d did quite a bit of DCT training this year and I’m sure has bigger plans in his future.
Peter Green completing an incredible feat of endurance by succeeding in 22 hours 40 mins. Whilst Peter didn’t train with DCT he was a very familiar face on the beach and many of us were glued to his tracker.
Daniel Shailer completed his solo on Tuesday in 15 hours 15 minutes. Daniel joined our ramp up camp and modelled his early training plan on the Joanna blogs. Not only that, but he dropped everything to crew for another swimmer in need with only a few hours notice. I’m sure that gave him some useful learnings for his own swim.
Nicholas Haynes, again, not a DCT swimmer but very worth a shout out for completing the crossing on backstroke!!

Well done one and all, you are all legends.

VOLUNTEERS

We’ve now run the first 6 weeks of Dover training and two weeks of ramp up camps using our Covid-19 procedures. We have had the same beach crew throughout and we have learned more as we’ve gone along.

It’s not like a normal year for volunteering as there are strict protocols that we aim to follow but I know that a lot of you expressed an interest in helping. So if you are still interested, I have now added a volunteer sign-up option to the booking system. You can find it here.

FEEDING

The questions on feeding continue. This time we’ve moved onto the topic of solids. This is topic of great debate. I’ll share my thoughts, and you should ask around for other opinions too, include those of your pilot. My opinion is that solids slow things down. They are not needed for nutritional content. So, my advice would be to stick to fast liquid only feeds.

There are a couple of exceptions:

If you’re taking ibuprofen
As a little surprise once in a while to give a surprise boost to the spirits

If you do have solids, each person has their own favourites and you should work out what your favourite it. Think of things that you:

Eat quickly
May give your tongue a break from the salt

Favourites are:

A piece of banana
Peaches (which can be chopped and placed in the feed for speed)
Flapjack
Small slice of cake like batten burg or swiss roll
A couple of jellybabies
A jaffacake

How you get the solids will depend on the boat, so work it out in advance. I find it passed to my hand efficient, but it can also be in a cup attached to the same reel as your feed bottle.

PHOTOS

A few photos from this weekend.

BOOKING SYSTEM

This year I have added a booking system to help you to take control of how you interact with us. You can book your weekend swims in advance (a necessity in this Covid-19 world), you can join a community call, book a one to one or sign-up for ur remote training support subscription packages.

If you want to use our booking system, it can be found below.

DCT Week 15 - What a scorcher!! 🥵