Almost all members of the team were amateur swimmers and this was their first English Channel swim. With enthusiasm, a team of 15 Bengalureans from the age bracket of 35 to 65 including four women members successfully crossed the English Channel. The team leader of the entire team and professional swimmer Satish Kumar, MD, Swimlife in a candid conversation with Anubha Jain, representative Lokmat, informed, “Four relay teams were formed -Seagulls (5 members relay team), Albatross (6 members relay team), Orcas (4 members relay team), and Seals (2-member relay team) in 2021. The team also included a solo swimmer, Aruna Venugopal who swam the entire channel by herself. The duration of the swimming remained from minimum 13hrs. to a maximum of 17 hrs. time frame for every team.”
Aruna cheerfully shared her experience and said, “As this was my first English Channel swim, I believed in myself, and the team and I swam. The happiness of achieving this task is beyond imagination. After every hour I took 15 sec. break for water and gel-based feed and also the nausea tablets we used to take. As a side effect, I got blisters in my mouth and throat.” Satish further said that passion for swimming, achieving something great, being a better swimmer every day, and testing their abilities were the motivating factors that drove them to take up this challenging task. It is to be noted that the English Channel is one of the toughest ocean swims. Long hours in the cold water of 14-16 degree Celsius induce hypothermia, stinging jellyfish, unpredictable weather conditions, tides, and currents are other threats crossing the channel. “To reach the French coast was my ultimate goal but the only threat was hypothermia,” stated one of the team members.The team did practice in various oceans, viz., the cold lakes of Udaipur City in peak winter, dark conditions at the VV Sagar Dam, Palk Strait (between India and Sri Lanka), Mengaluru, and Goa in the sea. The team started their training two years ago in 2021 under the guidance of Swimlife swimming academy which organized this English Channel swim. The team reached Dover, UK weeks in advance for familiarisation and training. The swimmers started practicing every day at the Port of Dover. They swam about 2-3 km in each session for 45 mins to an hour.“I chanted the Gayatri Mantra as I swam and when I was shivering in the boat, I kept the goal that was to reach the French coast in mind,” said 48-year-old Siddhartha Agarwal, one of the team members.