LC English Channel Attempt, Part One

Nearly a month ago, a long time friend and athlete, Larry, made his first attempt at swimming across the English Channel. Unfortunately, his swim ended just shy of the halfway mark in the middle of the channel after nearly six hours in the water.

Before going into details about his day, I’d like to share some details and background swimming the English Channel itself to give everyone a sense of how this all goes down.

The Rules.

Each swimmer begins their swim on the English coast and swims to France. At some point in the past, swimmers could start from either coast, but that is currently not the case. A boat takes the swimmer as close to the English shore as possible, the swimmer leaves the boat and swims to the beach and then the swim begins once a horn or whistle is sounded by the boat. At the end of the swim, the swimmer stands up on the French coast and a horn is blown signifying a successful crossing. If the swimmer is attempting a two-way (or three or four-way) they have ten minutes of transition time (on the shore/beach) before they have to begin the next leg of the swim.

In order to be part of an official crossing, a swimmer can only use a swimsuit, swim cap and goggles. There are some minor differences between the two certifying associations where one association allows jammers and watches, while the other does not, but the basic rule of suit/cap/goggles only is still front and center. 

Each swimmer has a boat assisting/guiding them to France. The boat can be on any side of the swimmer, based on sighting preferences and/or tides/wind (although the swimmer cannot draft directly behind the boat). Crew members can give feeds (drinks/food/etc) to the swimmer from the boat, but the swimmer can never touch the boat during the swim. Once the swimmer touches the boat, the swim is over.

Swimmers can have a crew member swim with them a few times during the day. The crew swimmer cannot get in until three hours into the attempt. Moreover, the crew swimmer can only swim for an hour at a time, followed by a three hour break before another one-hour swim is allowed. Also, the crew swimmer cannot lead the solo swimmer. In other words, no drafting allowed.

Each swimmer has an official swim observer on the boat that makes sure all rules are followed. The observer also tracks each feed (substance, calories and time taken) as well as checking the swimmer’s stroke rate periodically. One of the signs of hypothermia and/or exhaustion is a substantial drop from baseline stroke rate. 

The Boat.

The English Channel is the busiest shipping channel in the world. With that in mind, any boat that is following a swimmer has to have specific approval to do so. As such, there are only 12 boats at the moment that are allowed to assist swimmers across the English Channel. This means that even when the weather is absolutely perfect, there can only be 12 solo swimmers attempting a crossing on any given day. 

Getting a spot on a boat can be very difficult, simply because there aren’t many boats and many days to swim and there are exceedingly more and more swimmers that want to make an attempt. Swimmers are often committing years in advance, particularly if they are international and have to travel extensively. Swimmers based closer to Dover have a little more flexibility in their bookings.

Each boat is different; there is no standard make or model. Some are smaller, while others are larger. I would say most range in the 30-40 foot range and can accommodate the pilot, observer, swimmer and 2-3 crew members based on what the boat’s rules are (our boat allowed two crew members). Before being out on the water, I would have thought a boat on the slightly larger side would be preferable, but after being out there, I actually think the smaller boats make more sense in terms of their ability to easily maneuver and access/assist the swimmer. It does mean less space for everyone on board, but I don’t think that’s quite as important as it might seem.

The Tide.

When you hear swimmers talking about “their tide,” they are referring to a specific time period based around the timing of high tide across a specific time frame. A boat will book swimmers in 5-8 day windows that correspond to a tide timing. The time shifts about an hour each day so after a certain cycle, it essentially resets more or less to the beginning. What this means in a practical sense, is that each swimmer is booked “on a tide” which corresponds to a block of time. Within that tide, you might be the first swimmer on the tide, or the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc. The first swimmer on a tide has the first right to swim. In other words, if a tide is 8 days long and the weather is bad for 7, the first swimmer will swim on the 8th day and all the other swimmers will be out of luck. 

With all of the above in mind, you can see how a swimmer’s chances become more and more precarious based on where they are booked on the tide. Having a good enough day to swim is challenging, let alone multiple days in a row (but they do happen).

Typically, the first day on the tide means the swimmer will start somewhere in the middle of the night and then each following day the swim will start about an hour later. If you are first on the tide, your swim might start at midnight and if you are last on the tide, you would start 5-6 hours later. Technically, the swims could start 12 hours later to align with a similar tide pattern, but the night time starts are strategically done so that the swim can ostensibly finish in the daytime.

The Channel.

As previously mentioned, the English Channel is the busiest shipping channel in the world. In the portion where people swim, the channel is broken up into five zones. There is the zone closest to England, the zone for southbound shipping, the separation zone, the zone for northbound shipping and the zone closest to France. The separation zone is only about a mile wide while the other four zones are similar in size around 5-6 miles each. The total channel length is ~21 miles, assuming a best case scenario of one’s landing point in France.

The tides in the channel shift every six hours, which means that a swimmer trying to swim west to east (England to France) will be pushed considerably to the north and south every six hours. With the standard starting times, the first portion will be a northward push, then south, then north again. There is a piece of France (marked by a lighthouse) that sticks out furthest to the west that swimmers try to hit so that they can essentially swim the shortest possible distance between the two countries. However, because of the tides, if the swimmer doesn’t reach this point within a certain period of time, they will be pushed north, making this landing point impossible. What this breaks down to is being 10-15 minutes slower on the day can turn into a couple extra hours (and extended distance) because of the tides. In Larry’s case, I believed that if he was having a good day and the weather cooperated, that he could hit that point by coming in under the 12-hour mark. However, if the weather was challenging or he was slower than planned, instead of coming in at 12:15 or something like that, it would really amount to closer to 14 hours. In the case of swimming the channel, it really pays to swim a bit faster if one’s ability makes this landing point potentially within reach.

The water temperature is what I get asked about the most. Everyone that hears about the attempt almost automatically blurts out: “How cold is that water???”

Well, it depends on the time of year and how that year is playing out. In June, you’re probably looking at water in the range of 12-15 Celsius, then closer to 16-17 in the warmer months of the year (July-Sept). Most solo attempts start happening in late June or early July, but attempts can be done earlier than that if the swimmer deals with cold water well. Swimmers will also attempt well into the early fall as the water temperature stays high, but the later months will mean less available daylight and more nighttime swimming.

While the English Channel is cold by many people’s standards (myself included), many of the distance swimmers will look to the North Sea crossing (Ireland to Scotland) as a much colder swim to attempt. 

The channel is not a tranquil body of water. Wind is constantly whipping up the seas and the consistent presence of tankers in the water can also play into the roughness of the water when getting into the middle of the channel. The common wind direction that I have seen in my time in Dover is from the south to southwest (quasi crosswind for swimming), but it can shift around a bit. The wind will typically be at its calmest near sunrise and build throughout the day. Finding good enough weather to swim is the most perennial challenge in getting a chance to start.

The Crew and The Feeds.

The job of a swimmer’s crew is, first and foremost, to provide feeds for the swimmer. Every swimmer has their own feeding preferences, both in terms of time and substances. Feeding might seem like a simple thing, but in the English Channel, the movement of the boat, tides and the swimmer are all challenging components to balance out together. I heard a wide range of different feeding strategies. Some abstain from feeding until several hours into the swim, others liked to have big spaces to start and smaller later on. In our case, our plan was to do a feed every 30 minutes the whole way through. The feeds were liquid of 300ml consisting of a high-calorie drink mix, some flavoring, and some warm water. We would mix 150 ml of pre-mixed calories with 150ml of hot water. The water should be warm enough to help keep the swimmer’s core temperature up (though not so hot it’s undrinkable).

When feeding, the captain has to put the boat in neutral (and anticipate which way it will drift) while the crew member has to get the attention of the swimmer that a feed is coming up. Some crews use poles with baskets for feeds. We used a bottle with a rope attached that could go out up to 50 feet (which turned out to not be long enough) and could then be reeled back in. A swimmer can lose, or gain, a lot of time based on the efficiency of their feeds. I remember reading about Trent Grimsey’s record breaking English Channel swim (6:55) and how he averaged 3 seconds(!) per feed. While that might not be a reasonable target for most of us, one can see seconds add up to minutes which can even add to hours if the swim is long enough.

The Training.

I can only speak specifically to Larry’s case. Larry had to do the majority of swim training in the pool and without a squad to swim with. Fortunately, over the years he has done a number of open water swim camps where he has been able to swim six hours in cold water and has participated in open water races lasting six-plus hours.

With his pool training, I would build up a 48-hour block that had higher and higher volumes of swimming approaching 30K total (starting Friday afternoon and ending Sunday afternoon). I would alternate that with a single big swim the following weekend that never exceeded 15K and was usually more in the 10-13K range. The weekday swims would be more in the 3-5K range and would look like a typical swim program with a balance of speed/endurance/stroke/pull/etc. I would always come way down in the third week, more for a mental break than anything else. Larry always seemed to thrive during the swim races and the swim camps so I felt that we were generally on target with his swim training. 

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This concludes part one. In part two, I’ll cover the details of Larry’s July 5th EC attempt.

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If you want some additional information, you can find some helpful links below.

Statistics about the swim: https://longswims.com/events/english-channel/

Five part series on Trent Grimsey’s record breaking swim (great read): https://loneswimmer.com/2012/09/14/trent-grimseys-english-channel-world-record-from-close-up-part-1/

Wiki page on the English Channel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Channel