The Dakar-Goree Challenge: Day 15

I’ve rearranged my bedroom so that my bed is up against the window and as I write, I can see the sea.



It has the potential to make a big difference to my life, except I don’t appear to spend much time in my bed because every day this week I’ve been out until 3 and then had to get up for something early the next morning, usually something with a nautical theme.

Yesterday was Saturday, and the day for mine and Cecilia’s open sea swim. I know I got you all excited about this last week, posting photos of our triumphant swim to N’gor island. Well people, the swim to N’Gor was much like piffling around in the bath- clear warm waters, no waves, no current. The only real obstacle was the goat hair (and we’ve both been sick since then because of it).

This week we decided to swim from Oceanium, a water sports shack half way around the enormous bay which faces Goree Island (our eventual goal), to the Savannah Hotel, on the furthest point of this bay. The problem is that I swam 2.5km in the piscine this week, (yes, that’s 50 lengths of the Olympic swimming pool) and I had grown, shall we say, a little bit cocky. I thought, if I can do 2.5km then I can do 5 right? But let me tell you, 2.5km in the pool is not 2.5km in the sea. It is not even 1.5km in the sea. It’s nothing, there is no comparison.

Well, after asking some divers if there were any jellyfish in the water, we plunged into the rather turbulent sea and set off for the relatively short 700 meter swim to the Savannah. After a few seconds we realised that this was not going to be the short little hop we had imagined, because every time we brought our heads up to breath, a wave hit us in the face. And every time I did a stroke, the current would push me back the way I’d come.

And the water was murky. We’ve had glorious rainstorms but nice as that is when you’re lying in bed looking at the ocean, it also means that the water and everything on the bottom has been stirred up and you can’t see a thing. And here’s my biggest challenge. I am terrified of what I can’t see. After a few minutes I started imagining that if I did front crawl and kept my head down as much as possible to avoid the crashing waves, sooner or later a sea monster would glide into my goggled vision. Or a big fish. At one point I even imagined a dead body would float towards me. I was, shall we say, in a state of hyper-tension.

So imagine my terror, people, when into my vision did float something dark and terrible-looking, its body rank and bulbous, it’s poison-filled tendrils reaching out to do me harm. As it brushed my arm I cried out – glggg glllgg ggggglllllllg- and tried to swim away, sweeping the water and the evil monster it carried away from me. But it was in vain, I had been touched by a black plastic bag and swimming would never be the same for me again.

The journey carried on much the same way, and Ceclia made an apt observation about half way through the first leg.

“This is the closest I’ve ever got to being ship-wrecked,” she said, and I thought about The Perfect Storm and the one where Tom Hanks grows a lot of facial hair.

Eventually, a jetty came into sight and we waited for a wave to launch us up its barnacally steps. A man was there, in goggles too, collecting mussels.

“Have you ever seen a mussel before?” he asked, in much the same way that someone on Friday night asked us after we’d been at a Cheikh Lo concert for two hours if we’d ever heard of Cheikh Lo.

“Il faut essayer, huh?” and I imagined my hands around his neck.

Well, it was a sorry sight, Cecilia and I sitting with our knees hunched up on the steps of the jetty looking at the distance we’d come and would soon have to repeat.

“I really didn’t enjoy that at all,” I said.

“I hope there aren’t any sharks here because my knee’s bleeding,” said Cecilia who had scraped herself climbing up the steps.

Neither of us had anything positive to say.

Getting back in was a laugh. The sea was crashing on the steps of the jetty and kind of sucking all the water out and then thrusting it back even harder, so we had to leap in, clearing the steps, and then swim really hard so as not to become barnacle fodder.

I got into a better rhythm on the way back, my goggles didn’t steam up so much (I have a theory about this- I think my head is particularly hot and creates more steam in the goggles than is normal) and I began to harden my mind against the plastic bag fear. We eventually dragged ourselves up to the beach of Oceanium and quickly went to get food.

“No, this is good,” said the ever-optimistic Cecilia.

“I think this has helped us to become a lot more realistic about the swim.”

And she was right. It can’t get much more realistic than this. I am afraid of the sea and everything that floats in it, my eyes produce steam, and I am no match for the Senegalese current. We had done less than a third of what we will be doing in two weeks’ time and we were broken. Not even 12 falafels could lighten my spirits.

We met later on that night and discovered that we had both had emotional and tearful outbursts after we had left eachother. I cried when the man who I paid to unblock my mobile phone accidentally blocked my SIM card, and Cecilia had a row with her boyfriend after he touched her record player.

On my way home I went to visit Pape with something of a heavy heart. I told him the good news, that my friends and family have been kind enough to sponsor me for this swim so his school can make some improvements. But what I didn’t tell him was that I don’t think I can do this swim. Pape went into an emotional silence when I told him about the money, and then he got up and flung his arms around me and promised he would come along to Goree and wait on the finishing line with peanut butter sandwiches. I didn’t tell him about the plastic bags.