This year’s swim
We’re all just about recovering from this year’s Macmillan Padstow to Rock swim on Sunday, nearly 300 of us made the mile long swim across the estuary despite the threatening weather we’d had over the week end and even that morning. When I met up witht he rest of the organising committee at noon the big question was whether we would be able to go ahead with the swim: the wind was from the west most of the time but whenever a squall blew in the wind shot around to southerly, blowing up the estuary and creating some quite big waves. We decided that we would go ahead with the event and once the elite swimmers had crossed we would ask them what they thought of the conditions. In the event the weather gave us a real break in the late afternoon and the sun even shone on us on the way across!
The westerly wind which I mentioned earlier was a real help as it did push us along a bit, we even had a few following waves at one point but not regular enough to surf in on. With these conditions I managed my best time for a good few years if not ever, coming across in 28 minutes. We can never tell who has finished in what order out of the group of us who do this together but we all seemed to be around on the slipway at the same time. We were an elite team of three as Mel had to stay and work and Cath was caught out by the early closure of the registration as we were full before the day. Andrea’s sister who swam with us last year thought better of it this year as she is four months pregnant!
We had a star entry this year as Rick Stein braved the waters with a couple of his senior team too, all done with no publicity, just another swimmer amongst many.
The guestimate is that we will have raised over £10,000 for Macmillan Cancer Support so we are really pleased with the efforts of all of us who put in time and energy to making it happen but moreso to the many swimmers who have raised money over and above the entry fee. One 10 year old girl managed to raise almost a £1000 on her own!
We haven’t got as far as setting a date for next year’s swim but this will be around the same time as this seems to have worked so well but will depend on the tides and the Rock Sailing Club.
If you would like to make a donation please send a cheque to Macmillan Cancer Support,
Cornwall Fundraising Office
11 Seton Business Centre
Scorrier
Redruth
Cornwall TR16 5AW
More details will be available on the Macmillan website shortly.
