Friends of Guildford Lido

It may seem incredible to many but there are some FOGLs for whom swimming the English Channel and pounding up and down the Lido just isn’t enough exercise (or challenge, or cold, or whatever else it is that pops into the minds of these guys). This weekend FOGLs Jim Boucher and Rory Fitzgerald will be braving the chilly waters of the Irish Sea to make the 35 mile crossing between the Isle of Man and Northern Ireland. Jim gives us an outline of what’s ahead:

“We are building upon the successful challenge of last year’s IoM “End-to-end Swim”(E2E) that covered a comparable distance from Pt of Ayre to the Calf Sound. However last year we were sticking close into shore and benefitted from a few changes of tide that helped a little. We are the same team of 4, myself, Rory, Carole Laporte, a French lady and Mark Gorry a Manxman, all representing the combined Gaelic nations.

In the aftermath of the E2E swim, we considered the next step and the distance from Peel to NI is only slightly more (on a dodgy map). The target is a landing in the vicinity of Ardglass on NIreland’s Co Down coast. This is home soil for myself and Rory, albeit a few miles to the south. We can’t go much further north as the outflow from Strangford Lough is extremely powerful (the tidal movements provide one of the first tidal energy prototypes in UK). We don’t expect much tidal influence as we are passing into the area where the tidal flows north and south of Ireland cancel each other.

We are going early in the season to try and avoid the jellyfish that come in as the water warms up – although they did put on a show last year which was around this time. Likely water temperature is 11-12C and we will probably go for one hour relay legs as the cold will probably prevent us using longer legs. The ultimate choice will depend on weather. We have a team of experienced sea-kayakers who have previously assisted us in IoM waters and we have a small deep-sea fishing charter boat as our “mother ship”. We start at 4am hoping to make maximum use of the long daylight hours and are anticpating 16-18 hours swimming time. We are in standard “Channel” kit, ie a costume, goggles and a hat, unlike a team of 8 Irish who by pure coincidence are swimming the same day in the opposite direction….in wetsuits.

We wish everyone well in this challenge and will post up details here and on our Facebook page over the weekend as news comes in.