The day I thought I was going to die

7 hours — during which time he feared for his life...

But the punishment began the moment he dived into the water on a black Dover night.

‘It was rougher than I thought,’ he admits. ‘An hour in I needed a drink and they threw it out on a line and I couldn’t see it. I could see the crew in the air, then the boat’s keel and them flying up again. The pilot said later, if he’d known it was that bad, he wouldn’t have gone out.’

With his earplugs in, being thrashed and pulled about by waves and currents, Ger was very much in his own world, focusing purely on putting one hand in front of the other, oblivious to concerns on the boat.

‘I was looking at the same red beacon for three hours, I didn’t know where I was going, I was going in circles,’ he says. ‘The boats of the swimmers who’d gone ahead of me disappeared. I was thinking I’m not making any headway here. I was hitting the wall. At six hours in, I went into a dark place.’ Although Ger didn’t know it then, the two boats accompanying swimmers he thought were well ahead of him had been pulled out as the seas were too rough. But Ger ploughed on.

‘After the head came the body pains, the neck pain would move into the arms then into the legs. When the pain hits, you go back to thinking empty thoughts, focus on strokes, the movement of the hands, empty your thoughts,’ he says. ‘It’s all a mind game. At 12 hours, you get the body chills, but you talk yourself out of them. You tell yourself you feel toasty, you play the brain. I’d tell myself I’d just had a lovely hot chocolate, I’d imagine how cosy I was.

‘At one point when I was faltering, Ger Kennedy got in beside me to spur me on. We thought we’d swum 6kms by the time he got back on the boat, it turned out we’d done 750m. We were stuck in a current going backwards. I did two hours on the spot and I knew it as I could see the same landmark and a silver silo.’

Keeping fuelled is also an arduous task and Ger was being fed every 40 minutes. He’d pre-made meal-bags with a carbohydrate drink, a triangle piece of bread with banana and peanut butter or ham and cheese and an energy block.

‘They threw the fluids out in a carton, tied to a piece of string. I’d grab that and tread water,’ he explains. ‘Food is sent out on a stick and I’d eat for about 30 seconds — any longer and you go backwards or you could get pulled off in the current and add an hour. Out there I’m burning 1,000 calories an hour, so you’re always trying to refuel.’

To keep his spirits high, his team wrote out some messages arriving by Whatsapp on the white board.

His son, working in banking in Kenya, had his office glued to this white dot crossing the Channel, while his daughter, a student, checked in with her Daddy, a moving dot in the water, before and after a night out in Copper Face Jacks.

‘That was just lovely and reading messages from friends moves your mind off different things,’ Ger says. ‘At 13 hours someone sent that Irish joke about leaving the immersion on and in my head I was panicking, did I leave the boiler on in the campervan at Dover!’

After his brush with the P&O ferry and the French Coastguard, Ger finally touched the harbour wall at Calais at 4.38pm. Instead of the straight 50km swim he’d trained for, he’d clocked up 70km in 16 hours and 40 minutes.

‘At Calais, I felt utterly drained,’ he admits. ‘There’s a video of me eating a raw sausage roll with a cigar and champagne but I couldn’t swallow anything as my throat was so dry from the saltwater.

‘The emotions run away with you. I was reading the texts and I was crying. All five of us were in tears in the boat.’

Ger confesses: ‘If you’d said to me four years ago I would do this, I wouldn’t have imagined it. I put it down to training and the people and community around me — and the incredible work John is doing with the foundation.

‘To think of these families being so distraught and coming out of hospital and John turns up like an angel and says, “don’t worry, I’ll book this and meet you and arrange accommodation, just go to the hospital and be with your child”. It really inspires you on to do things.

‘John does all this when he has his own job and a family to mind. He’s incredible.

‘He does this because when his son Gavin got sick, they’d to do all the arranging themselves.

‘Now families don’t have that worry. They turn up in the same boat as John was in and he appears, like an angel, and minds them.’

VISIT the gavin glynn foundation. ie to donate and for more information

Food is sent out on a stick and I’d eat for 30 seconds