34 Channel swims and counting for Aussie Chloe McCardel

Sometime on Sunday night, Chloe McCardel will strike out for the French coast to notch up a record 35th English Channel swim.

Australian Chloe McCardel at Dover, where her 35th Channel swim will begin. Picture: David Mirzoeff

Sometime on Sunday night, Sydney swimmer Chloe McCardel will be back in the choppy waters off Dover, striking out once again for the French coastline to notch up a record-breaking 35th English Channel swim.

It’s a routine McCardel is well familiar with: a 10-hour battle of the mind as much as the physical pain battling the tides, winds and shipping traffic in one of the busiest waterways in the world.

But McCardel has overcome this time and time again. Earlier this month the 35-year-old ultra endurance swimmer and coach notched up three English Channel swims in just nine days after the Australian authorities agreed to an exemption for her to fly to the UK as her attempts were deemed “in the national interest’’.

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While Australia’s interest in the English Channel was piqued by Des Renford’s 21 crossings, and then Susie Maroney’s fast times in her crossings in the 1990s, McCardel has quietly amassed multiple swims, including a triple crossing in. 2015 and a record eight crossings in one season in 2016.

This month’s 34th swim equalled the most swims of the Channel by any male. Now if she succeeds with her 35th attempt, leaving Dover on Sunday at 10am local time, she has just Alison Streeter, Britain’s Queen of the Channel, who has done 43 swims, ahead of her on the all-time list.

Chloe McCardel is preparing for her 34th swim across the English Channel earlier this month. Picture: Instagram

The numbers and records are encouraging for McCardel, who also coaches others to do the crossing, but it is an overwhelming sense of peace she feels during her swimming that is the most cathartic and motivating.

She has literally seen it all in the waters that connect England and France: a submarine, fighter jets, the Russian navy, and in her 33rd swim, border force officials stopping migrants in small boats attempting to cross into English waters to claim asylum. That operation cost her an extra half hour of swimming time as she diverted around the drama.

Is she bored at any time?

“The English Channel is the mecca of open water swimming, it’s really magical, it has the busiest ferry route in the world and I just pop my head up and can see a gorgeous ferry floating by, or cargo ships and their colourful containers,’’ McCardel said.

“In a bathtub as a kid you have got little boats floating around you, now I am in the middle of an amazing world … it’s politically and geographically a significant piece of water.

“When the first man swam the English Channel it ignited an imagination for open water swimming and I am in love with it, it is my spiritual home. My residential home is in Australia, but I feel like home when I am here.’’

Importantly McCardel, who was originally from Melbourne before moving to Sydney’s Northern Beaches, hopes Victorians who are in lockdown can take a sense of hope and optimism from her efforts.

She said when she struggles midway through a swim she visualises the end result: projecting her mind to finish a crossing and imagines what she is going to hear, and even the taste of a buttery crumpet and anticipates the emotional relief and excitement and the joy of finishing. She wants people who are feeling trapped and stressed in an unpleasant place to try and mentally transport themselves to a positive future.

“I grew up in Melbourne, all my family and friends are there and it’s a very challenging situation. But nothing lasts forever, it might feel like forever but it’s not a permanent state and think instead of good things that can happen when the state opens up and we get to the other side,’’ she said.

She particularly hopes her swim will shine a spotlight on domestic abuse and how many families are doing it tough at the moment.

McCardel had to be flexible in her arrangements for this tranche of Channel attempts, having to train in open water instead of focused efforts in a pool because of coronavirus, and then having just three days notice that her exemption had been approved. Shortly after that news her dog died and she got sick.

“It was a chaotic whirlwind, the exemption, the death, not having logistics sorted, it was stressful to try and organise everything,’’ she said.

But now she is in England, McCardel would like to fit in as many Channel crossings as possible in the summer slots, which are usually the calmest sea conditions. However, some swimmers who cancelled earlier attempts are now trying to join the queue and further opportunities may be limited.

McCardel finances her attempts by coaching others, but coronavirus has impacted on many people’s abilities to train and to get to England.

Last year she coached 59-year-old Victorian farmer Rick Seirer to a non-stop double crossing.

“He was the oldest in history to swim two laps,” she said. “He wasn’t an ex-elite swimmer, he was a masters swimmer, and one year he swam a single crossing with me and we agreed he was in good enough shape to do the double, and then three years later he did it.

“I was so excited and thrilled for him; even more so than what I am when I do a crossing myself.”

Swimming the channel is controlled by the Channel Swimming Association and every attempt has to have an independent observer.

McCardel’s boat pilots and handlers are “like uncles’’ because she has done so many crossings with them, but she won’t know who the observer is until the morning of the attempt when the boat picks her up further down the coast and they motor around to the start point at Samphire Hoe with the White Cliffs of Dover looming beside her.

Dressed in just her bathers, swimming cap and smeared with lanolin to help keep her body warm, McCardel will hope to reach France before dusk.