True adventurers: Julie, Nicola and Ian
We were freezing, every part of our bodies ached and all three of us smelled horrific: a mixture of mud, wee, sweat, neoprene and a whole host of other stenches that we were too scared to find the sources of. It was day nine of our challenge, day six of our swim, and it was starting to get tough.
We were swimming between Ross on Wye and Goodrich and, from the start; we’d known that this would be one of the toughest days. The River Wye meanders in huge arcing curves through the valley with cliffs on one side and high banks and ploughed fields on the other making it difficult to navigate by landmarks or find a suitable place for our support team to bring us food and drink. We’d had to use a rope to climb up an irrigation pipe through nettles and thistles to get our first hot drinks that morning and it was a long way to our second stop. As we rounded a bend we were greeted with an explosion of feathers covering the surface of the water; a mixed flock of swans and Canada geese were sitting on the shingle beaches and floating in the shallows.