Day 2-- Karen went for an early morning run past the Seascout station, the lifeboat station and saw a lot of dog walkers in Deal. We packed our swim gear and drove to Dover. We were one of the first cars on the street at 9:30 a.m. A policeman was walking by so Noah made sure we were displaying our parking sticker correctly in the car window. This being our first swim, we didn't really know which side to start at, so we camped out in the middle. There were two male swimmers out in the water training and later we saw another girl in a blue swim cap and said hello when passing. The water temp was 62 degrees. We saw a washed up dogfish, which we thought was a baby shark. Pilot Andy King later said that he catches a lot of them when fishing. In her wetsuit, Karen entered the water with me and it took a minute to get used to the temperature. I started with a few strokes of head-up breaststroke before I made the salty face plunge. The first half hour I felt like I had fallen into a salt shaker. We swam from one sea wall back towards the other. When we started, the tide was low and can be seen on the poles in the water. Just an hour later, Noah was scrambling on the beach to move our stuff up 30 feet. After an hour and a few swigs of apple juice/Maxim feeds, Karen and Noah switched. Karen, while sitting on the beach, also had to move our stuff up a few more feet as the tide rose. She met an Australian and his girlfriend who stopped to ask if we were swimming the Channel. Noah swam the last 45 min. with me and then we grabbed our warm towels. With nowhere to shower or change, we changed out of our suits in the car and then walked around by the water.
At 1 p.m, we met Andy King, captain of the "Louise Jane," by the clocktower. We climbed aboard the boat and looked around. He showed us the gps monitors and a camera, which would be aimed at me when I was swimming. He has a stuffed Shrek doll on top of the cabin on a pole. In the small cabin, there is a little bench, several monitors, and a small stove. Our crew will be sitting on the large white benches on the boat, which will be storage containers for our swim stuff. They are actually lockers for fish, when he's not accompanying channel swimmers. We examined a map and several courses by other channel swimmers. We could see which boats were out and where they were located in the Channel. After our hour meeting, we walked around Dover for a bit before heading towards Folkstone. We stopped at the Hilltop Cafe for a warm drink and great view. We only hit a couple of curbs and then got stuck in a large traffic jam during rush-hour on our way back to Dover. The traffic was the same as going north on I-75 in Michigan on the FourWhen we got back in town we had fish & chips in Deal and came back to the house.
At 1 p.m, we met Andy King, captain of the "Louise Jane," by the clocktower. We climbed aboard the boat and looked around. He showed us the gps monitors and a camera, which would be aimed at me when I was swimming. He has a stuffed Shrek doll on top of the cabin on a pole. In the small cabin, there is a little bench, several monitors, and a small stove. Our crew will be sitting on the large white benches on the boat, which will be storage containers for our swim stuff. They are actually lockers for fish, when he's not accompanying channel swimmers. We examined a map and several courses by other channel swimmers. We could see which boats were out and where they were located in the Channel. After our hour meeting, we walked around Dover for a bit before heading towards Folkstone. We stopped at the Hilltop Cafe for a warm drink and great view. We only hit a couple of curbs and then got stuck in a large traffic jam during rush-hour on our way back to Dover. The traffic was the same as going north on I-75 in Michigan on the FourWhen we got back in town we had fish & chips in Deal and came back to the house.