Tony King’s channel swim

A day of high and excruciating drama. An old friend from Kent days set out, after five years training, to swim the 21-milr English Channel aka the Dover Strait.

He set off from Shakespeare Beach at 3.20am. I watched his progress on a swim tracker - the accompanying pilot boat - on and off, having been up at 4am UK time myself to beat the day’s heat.

He was closing the French coast by 4pm but then the tidal currents pushed him first south of Cap Gris-Nez and then as ebb turned to flood north of Cap Gris-Nez.

It was excruciating to watch on the mute tracker thinking he’d been in the 18C water for 15 hours. He finally made landfall NE of Gris-Nez after 17 hours and 13 minutes.

An epic and wonderful achievement requiring stamina and willpower beyond immagining.

I worked hard through the stolid, humid, baking Tuscan heat cutting grass and mending fences. But it was as nothing to Tony’s final exhausted landfall.