SHC swimmers, Dagny Suro '27 and Berlyn Ring '27, share a first hand account of their adventure swimming the English Channel in August. Suro and Ring are part of the 4X100 free relay team that set a new school record last spring. Congratulations to both swimmers on this amazing accomplishment! GO IRISH!!
Dagny: Berlyn and I are both on an open water team called Keck Crew. Our training sessions were every weekend at Aquatic Park. One time we had a special practice where we traveled by boat to the area below Golden Gate Bridge and did a practice swim. Berlyn and I actually swam together during that swim because we were supposed to swim in pairs. After that swim is when our coach Mike Keck decided that I should join the Channel relay so he emailed my parents and they told me. I was super excited because I had really wanted to do it when I heard about it.
For the rest of the summer the entire relay team trained for the swim. Even on vacation everyone found pools or lakes or bays to practice in. Our window for the swim was August 3-10. This meant that we basically had to travel to Dover, England, for this whole window and they would decide which day had the best conditions. I went up early on July 30 and went down to Sandgate, a town close to Dover, and did some practice swims by myself in the bay while I waited for the rest of the team.
When everyone got there on August 3, we did a training swim in the ocean. The next day we did another training swim in the morning and then around midday we found out that we would be swimming the Channel starting at 8pm on Monday, August 5. Since we weren't really expecting a night swim that night, we did a test swim where we put on all the lights on our suits and other things that we would be using for the actual swim. The relay order had Berlyn swimming second and me third which meant that Berlyn's first swim would be from 9-10pm and mine would be 10-11pm. We set out at 8:09pm as the sun was setting behind us. The way relay handoffs work is that you had to get off the boat and swim behind and around the person already swimming and then you could start your swim.
Berlyn: I honestly don't know how I ended up joining either the open water team or the channel team but I am so glad I did because it was definitely worth the experience
Berlyn First Swim (9-10pm)
When I started my swim it was around 9:09 pm and the sun had already set. I was swimming second after my friend Esme. The minutes leading up to the exchange were probably the worst because the realization that you were about to swim hit like a truck every time. A minute before the exchange the pilot would come to the back of the boat and open the gate that led to the ladder. At the bottom of the ladder was a platform that the next swimmer would stand on to be ready for the switch. The pilot told me to climb down the ladder and wait on the platform, when I did my feet were completely submerged in freezing water. When Esme's time was up the scariest siren would go off signaling the beginning of the switch. That sound will forever haunt me and the rest of the swimmers. When the alarm went off, I dove into the water and swam around Esme. Switching swimmers only had a couple of seconds to say what they wanted to to the next/returning swimmer, so you had to make it really quick. Esme yelled "good luck, you got this" while I told her "good job, you did great".
After our exchange I headed to the front of the boat and waited till I got the green light to start swimming. After I heard my coach yell "swimmer on board" I knew Esme was out of the water and I could start swimming. The cold wasn't the problem nor the huge choppy waves neither was the dark endless sea before me. Iit was the jellyfish. Even before the relay my worst fear was jellyfish, so when I felt a huge one slide down my stomach I freaked out and sprinted for the life of me. Every so often I would feel one or see one out of the corner of my eye and freak out. The waves were definitely worse than I thought they were gonna be but the boat pretty much shielded us from the worst of it.
Around the 15 minute mark I was very bored and had hummed all my favorite songs. That boredom didn't last long because I was then stung straight through my swimsuit by a jellyfish. It wasn't that bad, but it scared me a little too much. I was convinced that the jellyfish was still on me because it stung me again 3 minutes later. Eventually it let go or something and I was finally almost done. Around the 2 minute mark my hand grabbed a hard and slimy object, I immediately let go and kept swimming. Later when I got out of the water and exchanged with Dagny my friends informed me that what I had grabbed was in fact a fish.
Dagny - First Swim (10-11pm):
By the time I got in the water it was already pitch black inside the water and outside. The boat basically shone a light to the side of it so I could kinda see the water as I swam, although the light basically just made it look dark gray. It was pretty cold at first but I quickly warmed up and I ran into no jellyfish during my swim. I may have felt a couple with my hand but since I couldn't see I'm not sure if I was just paranoid. I couldn't really see the boat either because my googles got really foggy so the only way I knew which part of the boat to swim next to is because it had a bright red light. I couldn't see my coach either even though he stood on the side of the boat the whole time. Every 15 minutes he would yell a time warning (45, 30, 15) and then the last 15 minutes he would also yell 10, 5, 3, 2, 1. Most of the swim was fine but sometimes the boat would pull ahead of me which was really scary because it took the light with it, meaning I would swim in pitch black until I could catch up with the boat again. I tried to pick up my pace the last 15 minutes.
The boat was pretty small so a lot of people got seasick. I got a little seasick after my swim but I was fine like 20 minutes later. Most of the time we all sat on the front of the boat because it was where we got the least seasick but it wasn't great for sleeping. I didn't get any sleep at all between my swims and the only thing I could make myself eat was a granola bar. Berlyn took a nap at one point but no one could really sleep for that long comfortably. We could see the stars pretty well which was super cool because we also saw some shooting stars. Through the night we cheered on the person swimming and looked at the lights of France on the other side of the channel which didn't feel like they ever got any closer. For probably like 2/3rds of the swim England looked a lot closer than France. We could see the faintest lightening of the sky by the time she began to swim but it was pretty much still pitch black.
Berlyn's second swim (4-5am):
The second swim was much more emotionally exhausting but for some reason less eventful then the previous swim. First of all it was lighter so we could see a lot more, there were less waves which definitely invited the jellyfish. The problem about the second swim was that instead of normal nice moon jellyfish there were big nasty red ones that stung. So near the end of my swim there was at least one every 4 minutes. I never had to go around them but there were times where I just kept sprinting hoping that it wasn't too close to me. By the end of my swim I was so happy to be out and done.
Dagny's second swim (5-6am):
The second swim was definitely a lot tougher than the first. The water felt colder and I was completely exhausted. It was a lot lighter because the sun rose during my swim. We also saw a pirate ship that they apparently filmed parts of the pirates of the Caribbean on while I was swimming. Since everyone got distracted by that coach Mike forgot to give me the 45 minute warning so I was freaking out a little bit because I thought it hadn't even been 15 minutes and it had already felt so long. Eventually I just asked him and it turned out I was already at 30 minutes. I got stung by a jellyfish on my arm which stung a lot for the rest of the swim but didn't hurt that bad. The last 15 minutes were definitely the toughest because I started getting surrounded by jellyfish, and not the nice kind. Because the water was murky it looked like they came out of nowhere which scared the life out of me a couple times. Every couple strokes there would just be one right next to me and one time I came within half a foot of running head on into one that had tentacles that were probably 4-4.5 feet. I was freaking out a bit because I became really paranoid but I finished my swim and got back on the boat.
After my swim we still had a long time left on the boat. We went through a second full rotation, meaning everyone went twice, and the first swimmer, Esme, ended up having to swim the last 6 minutes to make it into France. The swim took us a total of 14 hours and 10 minutes. We swam 37 miles and 32 nautical miles, the currents where mild but the winds were strong. Finally we headed back to England. The boat ride back to England also seemed to take forever because of how exhausted we were even though it was only 3 hours. When we got back on land we went to this pub called the White Horse which was Dover's oldest pub. On the walls and ceiling of the pub people were allowed to write their channel swims, relay or solo. Our team wrote our team name on the wall next to the door along with our time, the date and our own names. It was a pretty cool experience because we knew that writing would be on the wall for a long time.
Overall it was a cool and fun experience even though it was super hard at times. And WE SAW DOLPHINS!!!!!!
