Part 1. Part 2. Leaving Shakespeare Beach, Trent swam straight for the previously discussed port side of Gallivant. Is this time to talk about port and starboard? These are not useless terms, useful only to professional sailors. Port and starboard are highly useful and accurate terms intended to avoid confusion at sea. Confusion in dangerous…
Part 1 To step back a moment, the first post didn’t exactly explain why Owen and I were on the boat. I can only surmise that when Trent asked me to crew early on in the week, I think it was partly because we’d already been touch by email and Twitter, and partly because of…
As some of you know, I was fortunate enough to be crewing aboard Mike Oram’s Gallivant for FINA Grand Prix 2012 Winner Trent Grimsey‘s English Channel Record. And I know you want the details. How did that happen and what did I (we, Owen O’Keefe, Ireland’s youngest English Channel Soloist, aka the Fermoy Fish was…
Recently, Alan Clack & I hiked up to Coumshingaun in the Comeragh Mountains, as part of his Channel taper in Ireland, and because we were looking for some cold water. The silence from Alan as we hiked upward was deafening. “What the hell are we doing”, I could imagine, and worse, going through his head. Coumshingaun is…
Back in June after the Cork Distance Week, Owen O’Keeffe, aka the Fermoy Fish, Ireland’s youngest ever English Channel swimmer, suggested a swim in Tipperary’s Bay Lough, up in the Knockmealdown Mountains. And so it was that the Fish, Dave Mulcahy, myself and Jen Schumacher, visiting Ireland for the Camp from California, met one morning in…
Continuing to take advantage of unusually warm water that is completely out of sync with the crap summer we are experiencing, I’ve been revisiting some of the caves and arches from last year’s Project Copper now that I have a waterproof camera (oop, just realised I must do a review of it) to take…
Summer swimming on the Copper Coast 1 – Islands and Arches Having swam at Kilfarrasy with Lisa, a more extraordinary cave swim came two days later when we swam another section of the Copper Coast. First we swam into one cave, exited and swam around a tall overhanging sea stack, getting gently pushed and pulled…
Summer in Ireland! See for yourself. In the middle of a horrible summer, some swims can still just be so much … fun. You don’t always need racing or swimming big distance or doing challenges. Sometimes just easy swimming with a friend can result in a truly memorable swim. Here’s a quick reminder of how…
MIMS 2012 – Part 1 – Three Rivers (loneswimmer.com) MIMS 2012 – Part 2 – Race Day (loneswimmer.com) MIMS 2012 – Part 3 – The start and the first hour (loneswimmer.com) MIMS 2012 – Part 4 – The East and Harlem Rivers (loneswimmer.com) Advice for future MIMS applicants & particpants (loneswimmer.com) With the swing west across Spuyten Duyvil the…
MIMS 2012 – Part 1 – Three Rivers (loneswimmer.com) MIMS 2012 – Part 2 – Race Day (loneswimmer.com) MIMS 2012 – Part 3 – The start and the first hour (loneswimmer.com) For the three people who asked for this, sorry for the delay, it’s been a busy few weeks, Stephen Redmond and Channel swimmers are far more important.…
This is astonishing. – Donal *** Tsugarui Channel FEAR AND LOATHING JAPANESE STYLE Saturday 14/7/12 in Tapi Japan 4.00. I am going blind from checking the weather on my phone. Every one of the weather apps tell me today is going to flat calm with light north-westerly winds, hard to believe after the gales of…
Part 1 Part 2 And then it was 10:22 a.m. and Go-time. Through sheer laziness, rather than Machiavellian scheming I’d underestimated my 1500m time in the application process (not the first time I’ve done something similar) so I was off in the second wave, after the slowest swimmers in the first wave, with Ciarán and…
Part 1 – Saturday indeed broke more bearable, with temperatures in the high twenties with an almost cloudless sky and no forecast of rain or thunderstorms. I’d brought my bag of oatmeal for porridge which I microwaved in the hotel dining room, and as usual, forced it into myself. It was not the best bowl…
The weather in Ireland has been broken for the past five days. It didn’t operate as normal. It’s the end of March and instead of the usual dull cold grey, it’s been warm, bright and sunny. So like quite a few others I changed to a few days of sea swimming and even did a…
Reflections on Project Copper. I’ve swam about 54,000 metres to cover the 25 kilometre coast, which were swum as a series of out and back swims, so every metre of coast was swam twice. With the experience I’ve gained of the various currents on this stretch of coast, I now know there are longer swims…
Ballyvooney Cove is on the smaller coast road between Stradbally and Bunmahon and is not well known. It has heavy shingle and is difficult to walk on above mid-tide, like some of the others along this coast like Annestown. It’s only a couple of hundred metres across and the same to the flanking rocks. To the south-west…
This is Project Copper Coast swim number nine. Yes, I know I’ve haven’t put numbers on them until this but I only foresaw one swim after this to finish. I first visited Ballydowane as a small child with my family, and never knew the name nor location, until I visited it over 25 years later,…
In 2010 while Channel training I did the majority of my Waterford training at Clonea, trying to eek out some fractional comfort from the average extra 0.25 degree Celsius water temperatures, after spending the previous few years mainly swimming at the Guillamene, where I returned again last winter and this spring and early summer. But…
I thought I’d already posted this swim, as in the swim report for Bunmahon to Ballydowane, I alluded to previously discussed knowledge of Bunmahon from years visiting it and as the surf spot that I know best, even better than Kilmurrin. I must have spent hundreds of hours surfing here. As a swimming location it…
I had some nervousness about this swim for a few reasons. Having previously discussed my familiarity with Bunmahon, I’ve written about the dangers on the beach. These don’t worry me because it’s a very localised danger, for inexperienced or non-swimmers, that covers an area of a few dozen metres squared. But I recalled a couple…
Back at Annestown within a couple of days, when I doubt I’d been here for a year. I’ve described Annestown from a surfing point of view in the Annestown to Boatstrand post. When I arrived, it was a bit different. There was some actual groundswell (not very large), the sky was blue and the day…
So why not come at Boatstrand from the opposite direction? I asked myself. And then I answered. Why, no reason. No reason at all. of course, since yesterday’s post, you now know why. Annestown is another part of this coast I know better from surfing. I’ve never even really seen a reason to swim here.…
Anyone following the new swim spot reports recently or looking very closely at the tag cloud (and why would you, since you actually have a life) may have seen a tag called Project Copper on the site for the past couple of weeks. It recently struck me, in one of those why-haven’t-I-done-this-before moments: Why not…
Having explored Kilmurrin to Boatstrand, an obvious step was to swim underneath the 50 metre cliffs to the west of the cove, toward Bunmahon. The conditions were typically similar. Force Two onshore. Tide was lower though, only half in the cove. I left via the usual route on the left of the cove aiming to…
The first time I ever air-dropped a wave and stuck it was in Kilmurrin. That’s surfer lingo. Something I’ve rarely used and sparingly. I refused to ever say gnarly, or stoked, for example. In Ireland, I always thought, we had sufficient command of expressive language and a predilection and culture for description such that surfer speak terms…
LoneSwimmer 