Destiny's Child

The wetsuit is being delivered, the hotel is letting me use their microwave to make my breakfast and I have stood in freezing water off Bognor Regis to try to acclimatise. So, with just 4 days and one light training session left before, literally, plunging into the challenge that is scaring me more than any other it’s time to try to explain how I've managed to find myself swimming from “The Rock” to “Frisco”.

I was very young when I realised that I was unlikely to achieve my ambition of being a hedonistic, aristocratic, revolutionary, Georgian dandy poet. However, like the beer bellied middle aged pub ogre who still thinks he can play for Liverpool, the urge has never quite left me. So, about 5 years ago whilst reading an idiot’s guides to Lord Byron I found out that his proudest achievement was swimming the Hellespont. The women don’t fall at my feet and I don’t have a butler to lay out my ruffled shirt but, I thought, Byron had a club foot and so surely I can emulate his swim. Since then I have thought about it on occasion but never done anything about it. Then, as the 30th Year Challenges started to take shape I decided it was the perfect opportunity, so I made further investigations. I found out that the Hellespont, this classic stretch of water that drowned Helle in the Golden Fleece, was lashed by Xerxes and swum by Leander in the name of love, is now about 3 miles of commercial ships and man-eating sharks. It is also only closed for swimmers on certain days. This was too far and too awkward for me - my last hope to be like Lord Byron vanished*.

If there is one thing I have learnt from mythology it is that our fate turns on the most innocuous moment. For me it was not knowing how to spell Hellespont. I searched for it by Googling “historic swim Byron Turkey”. It was a successful tactic with plenty about the Hellespont in amongst the porn. Even though my dreams were shattered I decided to punish myself by reading more about the trip. That is when I found a link to www.lanelinestoshorelines.com a site run by a guy named Gary Emrich. Gary has swum Alcatraz Bay over 500 times and organises it so others can cross too. This swim was not so far (somewhere between one and a half and two miles) and could be done year round, albeit in colder water. The Hellespont was clearly working its mystic powers on my own destiny, I had already arranged to go to San Francisco for a holiday in March and I can’t fight such blatant supernatural forces. I emailed Gary.

And that’s it, I can’t do any more to be ready, it’s in the lap of the Gods. So let’s hope they have left Turkey to follow the American Dream.

*Refer back to this later in the year when I do the Slam Poetry Challenge.