From jellyfish in the Caribbean to hypothermia in the English Channel, swimming hasn’t been easy for Chloë McCardel – but can feel ‘so wild and free’
e’re not off to a good start. I’m fumbling with my cap, the rubber clinging to my head lopsidedly, my hair straggling out. I take it off to start again and the woman who has swum the fickle English Channel more times than any other human, the “Queen of the Channel”, instructs me in how to correctly apply a swimming cap.Chloë McCardel and I are going for an ocean swim at Bondi. She dives into the foamy sea ahead of me – more slender mermaid than broad-shouldered Amazonian.
McCardel has conquered other waters too: in 2014 she set a world record for the world’s longest non-stop ocean swim – 124.4km from Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas to the capital Nassau, a 41-hour, 21-minute journey.But the bare numbers and facts hardly tell McCardel’s story. There are good times when the sea is as smooth as a pane of glass, the water clarity is extraordinary, dolphins bounce around and she feels her technique is exquisite. But things can go bad quickly.
McCardel looks out over Bondi. In cooler water swims, she has been told, she had been on the edge of death.During her first attempt to triple-cross the Channel in 2011, the weather turned. She was floundering, barely stroking with one arm and resisted her support crew’s attempts to get her out. “My brain was not functioning.” When she was pulled out she couldn’t walk, was delirious and mumbling and dangerously hypothermic.
At some point, though, she had decided she wanted to be “the best in the world at something”. She tried triathlon but failed to reach an elite level. She did well in the Melbourne marathon and started to think that distance might be where she could be the best. In 2007, she did a marathon swim, 11.3km between Frankston and Mornington. “It was so wild and free … I had this beautiful connection with the water.
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