HOME AND DRY
EXTREME sportsman Ross Edgley emerges from the water for the first time in 157 days after becoming the first person to swim around Great Britain.
Ross was joined for the final mile of his 1,791-mile journey by 300 other swimmers, 57 of whom had swum the English Channel.
He did his last few strokes of front crawl before coming ashore where he had begun – in Margate, Kent.
He said: “I had to put my goggles on. I was getting really emotional.
“I thought I was going to fall over. And then I started running – that was a mistake. I was really wobbly.
“It feels a bit weird. Feels a bit too solid for my liking.”
Ross left Margate on June 1 and then circumnavigated Britain by front crawl, travelling clockwise.
He had expected it to take 100 days and told his family “Sorry I’m late” as they greeted him alongside hundreds of others on the beach.
During his epic feat, Ross’s tongue started to disintegrate due to the exposure to salt water and he was also stung in the face by a jellyfish.
The 33-year-old, from Grantham, Lincs, swam for up to 12 hours a day – and sometimes through the night.
Ross battled strong tides and currents in cold water, storms, shoulder pain, wetsuit chafing and swimming into winter.
He was accompanied by Cornish sailor Matthew Knight, supporting him from his catamaran, Hecate.
The odyssey has been compared with that of Captain Matthew Webb, who in 1875 became the first person to swim across the English Channel. But while more than 1,900 swimmers have since made that crossing, few are likely to follow in Ross’s wake.
And he was thrilled by his reception early yesterday morning.
He said: “That was unbelievable. You won’t find many other sports where people will come out in November, at five o’clock in the morning, just to swim out for a mile.
“That represented what I love about open-water swimming.
“Because I’ve had my face in the water for so long now I didn’t know – I thought it was just going to be my mum and my dad with a pizza.”
Ross entered the Guinness Book of World Records on August 14, on day 74, for the longest staged sea swim. It is his latest record-breaking feat. In 2016, he did a rope climb equivalent to the height of Mount Everest in 19 hours – two months after doing a marathon pulling a car. And his mantra on challenges? “Be naive enough to start and stubborn enough to finish.”
Number of swimmers who joined Ross for the last mile of his epic feat
The number of days it took Ross to swim 1,791 miles around Britain