This is what I remember from the day. My feeding plan was that I would feed every hour for the first 3 hours and then every half an hour after that until I arrived in France. Irene, the observer, had reminded me to keep the time spent on feeding to a minimum. This is something that is told to you on a regular basis during training in Dover harbour. It's similar to pit stops in motor racing. The quicker you can fill up the sooner you can be back on the track racing. Saving time on feeding can be the difference between missing your tide at the end of your swim and having an extra 2 hours to swim, or not.
I remember thinking that the longest training swim I had done was 7 hours and therefore I had to make at least 7 hours. So I counted through my feeds until I got to the 7 hour point. People ask me what do you think about - I can't really remember. I know at some times I counted (1, 2 breathe, 1, 2, breathe). Sometimes I thought about all the training I had done. Sometimes I thought about not wanting to fail.
5 minutes before a feed either Don, Rob or my dad would hold out their hand so that I knew food was coming. When I was fed, I was thrown a bottle on a string with warm maxim in it. I lay on my back, gulped it down as fast as I could and then carried on swimming. The guys on the boat would give encouragement and Irene, particularly, was fantastic. After every feed, she gave me the thumbs up and clapped me - making sure that I could see her.
After the swim I found out a few things that happened on the boat. As the conditions were very flat, the boys did not attach the thermos flask with the hot water for my feeds in it to the boat. After my first feed, the wake from a passing boat, shook Suva and the thermos ended up on the floor with all the hot water spilt. Luckily as I had just been fed they were able to boil a kettle and strap the thermos to the side of the boat.
I think it was the 3.5 hour feed when I was first given solid food - a cadbury's mini roll. I took a bite, but it took too long to eat and I didn't want to waste time so I threw the rest of it away. At the 4 hour feed I was given half a banana - again it took too long to eat and so I told the guys that I didn't want anymore solid food. This made the subsequent feeds much quicker.
I got stung by a few jelly fish on the day. The worst sting was when I was swimming through some sea weed and a jelly fish was hidden, or stuck, in the sea weed. As my face went into the sea weed it hit the jelly fish - which stung me all over my nose and cheeks and then as I swam past it stung my shoulder. At least it gave me something else to think about.
There was a dolphin that came up to swim with me for a while - I never saw it - but the guys on the boat told me about it. If there were ever sharks I would be shark food.
I cannot be sure exactly what happened when but these things happened at some point in the swim.
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