194 Bold & Beautiful swimmers !!
The water was beautiful, with blue skies, sun and finally warm water, no wonder we broke all of our records this morning !! :-)
What a bumper swimming day it was today... starting with a fantastic record number of swimmers swimming to Shelly and back with a mystery bottom off the point... any guesses ?? ;-)
We had lots of children this morning too which is awesome, including two of Andrew Thomas' boys; Dylan (aged 8) and Owen (aged 7) and Teagan Myerscough (aged 11) with her Dad, James who are featured in the photos below.
We also smashed the 2000 barrier, now currently sitting at 2006 B&B participants. Congratulations to Tessa Berkeley who is our 2000th swimmer !! :-)
A significant record for our 6km and 10km summer badge swims too, with 40 swimmers setting off together, all continuing on from the Shelly swim up to Queenscliff then across to Freshie Pool. There, 9 of the swimmers headed back to Manly and successfully completed the 6km summer badge swim.
The other 31 of us continued on around Freshie headland and into South Curly Beach for our teddy bears picnic, kindly delivered by Nick Turner. Thanks Nick ! Also thank you very much to Nicolee Goins who followed us the whole way headland by headland and to Maureen Rath our resident Angel who as always was on hand to apply the much needed sunscreen today. Yes we actually had sun :-)
A couple of people enjoyed the one way swim so got a lift home from Curly. Good move, as they didn't have to face the surf that seemed to appear just as the rest of us set off on our return leg.
The return swim started with the Bee-line Bolters who only had two re-groups the whole way back meanwhile the rest of us social sun worshipers took all the re-groups we could get ;-)
The great news is that in true style, everyone who wanted to finished the 6 and 10km swims that they set out to do. OK, well maybe that's not quite true. A couple of people, at least Luitz and Midge completed the 10 when they had only set out to do the 6 ;-) Pretty damn impressive when Luitz has only ever swum one 3km swim before ! Well done :-)
I'm sure you're all wondering if our Pacific Leader took on the 10km swim today... well he did... and he finished !!! Congratulations Neil, that is a massive achievement which I am sure will inspire many others.
The cutest moment of the swim would have to be Billy Derrin's who was sooo thrilled, I think I could even be excused for saying 'deliriously happy' to have some pink caps smiling and waiting for him at Shelly before the last 750m finishing leg.
Well done to every swimmer who completed the 6 and 10km swims this morning. Fantastic effort !! To see who they all are please check out today's attendance and to quote Iain, "what a good way to start Christmas - in calorie deficit" :-)
We musn't forget we also had Brendan, Ben, Collie, Daniel, Gaetan and Marty who set out early for a Bolderdash before hand. All of them continued on for the 10km swim, so all up they completed 13kms ! A mammoth effort guys, well done :-)
There are some fantastic photos coming later today courtesy of Nicolee Goins
Hope to see you all for a Christmas swim to Shelly and back at 7am tomorrow :-) Plus, you're all welcome to join us for the BYO BBQ brekkie at Shelly afterwards too.
Tim's fact of the day: "Pacific Ocean is almost triangular in shape, narrow in the Arctic north and broad in the Arctic south.."
Happy birthday to Julie Speer and Neil MacLean today ! :-)
Water Temperature 22.2
Air Temperature 19.5
Sunrise 5.42am
Sunset 8.07pm
High Tide: 8.30am
Low Tide: 3.15pm
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