Mullingar relay teams conquer Channel

Two teams of swimmers from Mullingar completed a gruelling relay swim across the English Channel at the weekend.

The teams set off from Shakespeare Beach, at the foot of the famed White Cliffs of Dover, on Friday and reached France in 14 hours and 13 minutes and 16 hours respectively.

On ‘Team Malachy’, the first group over, were Isabel Mooney, Enda Munnelly, Stephen Bell, Ryan Ivory and Anne Claffey, whose support boat was Sea Satin, while the members of the second team, Team Turgesius’, were father and son Anthony and Conor Hughes, with Trevor Hyland, Larry Mulligan and Robbie Keane, whose support boat was the Gallivant.

While there was a real high as the teams achieved their dream, Anthony admitted that feeling had passed quickly: "It’s almost kind of a half-downer now it’s over, and the teams have scattered," he said yesterday, Monday, morning.

The 10 are all serious sea swimmers, who swim in Dublin every week and members of Mullingar Jets. At 71 years of age, Anthony was, as he puts it himself "by far" the most senior of the swimmers, and a particular thrill for him was the fact that many of those participating were people he had taught to swim as children.

Anthony credits Robbie Keane with having set the wheels in motion for the event. "It’s something I dreamt of doing years ago, and Robbie decided he would organise it," says Anthony.

The route is challenging, as it is through one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, and the rules require that the swimmers each swim for an hour at a time, and the final swimmer is allowed to touch the shore of France and then return to the boat. "The reason for that is that you don’t know where you’re going to come ashore, and there’s no customs or emigration at the shore.

"I got three one-hour swims," said Anthony, explaining that the team members took turns swimming for an hour at a time.

"It was a tough swim," he continues. "The swim was done at the upper end of what they [the boat pilots] would let anybody do. They wouldn’t let an individual swim it because it was just too rough for one person to do: some individuals would take up to 22 hours to do it."

Even doing it as part of a relay means it is a tough exercise: "I would have trained the last couple of weeks, and some of the lads would have done something similar. I’d have gone out to the lake first thing in the morning, say 7 o’clock in the morning for an hour. Three hours later, I’d do another hour. Three hours after that, another, or maybe I’d get in four one-hour swims.

"But it was still a lot tougher in the sea, even though it was very salty and it was easier to swim in the sea – however, it was still, for some reason, much tougher."

Particularly challenging is a strip in between the north-bound and the south-bound shipping lanes, known as the "separation zone" or the "dead zone"."All the jellyfish and seaweed get pushed into that zone, and poor Robbie got caught having to swim the dead zone."

The cross-channel swim is one that nearly every open sea swimmer has floating around in the back of their minds, says Anthony: "It’s talked about and most swimmers know they’re never going to do it, but they know of it," he says.

Little talked about is the sea-sickness that besets many participants, and Anthony was struck by that too, but got over it.

Organising to go isn’t as simple as deciding on a date and time, and it’s also quite expensive: participants have to hire the services of a pilot and a boat for a week, and it is the pilot who makes the call on when the conditions are right for the expedition to start.

Usually, swimmers depart in the dark and arrive in the light, but the pilots’ call for the Mullingar group was a morning departure, in the light, which meant they arrived in France after dark.

All the swimmers are members of Mullingar Jets Swimming Club. The event involved meticulous planning over the last 18 months, and extensive training, most in Lough Owel to best prepare all 10 swimmers for the challenge ahead. Their landing point in France was Cap de Griz-Nez in the early hours of Saturday morning, July 18, having to swim through the night.