05/07/2026
Well, we did it!
We travelled down on Wednesday afternoon, arriving just in time to make it to The Elephant & Hind pub in Dover for the England v DR Congo match.
The next day we kept ourselves busy with photo shoots at the Captain Webb statue and a visit to Kingsdown beach. This was a beautiful spot where Trude Ederle, the first ever woman to swim the English Channel, came ashore. We visited to pay our respects to “The young woman and the sea” (give the Disney film a watch).
Around tea time we got the green light and planned our RV with crew and observers (2) for 2350 that evening. Rich had an old mate (Steve W) pop down to see us all off, making a 3 hour round trip drive at that time of night!
We boarded our boat, Anastasia, and headed to Samphire Hoe. At 01:05 on Friday morning Stuart jumped off the ship in total darkness and headed for the shore, once on dry land he held both arms up and the swim commenced.
Throughout the night we took turns to swim, changing at five past each hour, the new swimmer jumping off the back of the boat and then swimming passed the one in the water, allowing them to get out and warm up. By leg 4 the sun was just starting to appear on the horizon, meaning we could now see where we were going and what we were swimming with! Lots of colourful jellyfish were everywhere, but due to the strong swell of the tide they remained largely a few feet under the surface.
The sea was choppy at times, often feeling like we weren’t making any progress, being a spring tide, we were experiencing swells up to 6 metres high and it often felt like a battle.
In 2019 channel 4 did a program called “Sink or Swim” in which Ross Edgley trained a group of celebrities to do a channel relay. They described swimming in that swell as “trying to swim inside a washing machine, in the dark, whilst 6 people were beating you up”. (By the way, they didn’t make it across).
By this point, a few of the swimmers, Kenny our crew man and one of our observers were being sick over the side of the boat.
We pushed on, and France became clear in the distance and our phones switched to the new time zone. We kept trying to update everyone as best we could but the signal wasn’t always great. By the time our 2nd round of swims came around the sun was up and we began to gain in confidence. We had thought we would finish between 13 and 15 hours but was well on course to beat that, at one point our ETA was predicting an under 10 hour swim. However, soon the tide turned again and we had swam south of the Cap. The pilot suggested we head for a beach finish so as Stuart began round 3 we headed towards the beach just to the South of Ambleteuse.
As we had made good timing, the pilot agreed that all 5 of us could swim the last few hundred yards together, but as Malc was the lead swimmer on this leg he had to finish first, and nobody could touch him until he cleared the shore onto dry land.
All 5 of us landed on the beach and was quickly greeted by some friendly locals that wanted to chat to us about what we had done, even having selfies with us whilst we tried to converse without sounding like the Policeman off ‘Allo ‘Allo.
We finished with a decent time of 11 hours 45 mins in the end, heading back to England enjoying the sun and Champagne until we hit Dover.
Thank you to every single person that has helped us, trained with us, followed our journey, supported us, donated to our page, or just put up with us! The just giving page is still open, at the last check we had raised over £10k for Harbour Place which I know they are very happy with.
For now, the band have agreed to go our separate ways and pursue our solo careers.
Thank you,
Stuart, Malc, Neil, Washo & Rich, The Backstroke Boys x
