It is choppier than forecasted in the English Channel, and it is colder than usual at this time of the year, but the French coastline finally comes into view – there is hope.
Bethany Forster speeds up.
The reality soon creeps in. She has been staring at a piece of land for too long.
“I’d forgotten about the whole S shape. I forgot we’re kind of going parallel to the coastline in a way,” she later recalls.
“I was like, man, I’m not getting any closer.”
The doomed destiny comes down to one thing: fuelling. The swimmer accidentally bought low-sugar gels, giving her far less energy than planned.
As her speed drops, she misses the tidal window. With no food left on board to fuel another several hours of swimming, her team has no choice.
The pilots, who are closely monitoring Bethany on a support boat nearby, pull the plug. They tell the swimmer to get out of the water. It’s over.
The Lyndhurst local’s first English Channel attempt: 3 kilometres short of the shore. 48.6 kilometres swum, through hundreds of jellyfish, but avoided being stung. 11.5 hours in the ocean. An odyssey that starts at 2am in the dark water.
It was all fine at the time, but the afterthoughts hurt, Bethany admitted.
“I’m tired. I’m cold, and we’ve been going for a long time. I swam through heaps of jellyfish, so at that point, I had been pretty over it for a long time.
“It was afterwards. It wasn’t really a little bit the same day, but it wasn’t really until the next day that I was like, oh, damn.
“I just cried.”
But she’s far from defeated. She already has her second attempt booked for next year.
Second attempt at the English Channel seems to follow a proud legacy, as nearly a century ago, Gertrude Ederle, the first woman ever to swim the English Channel, succeeded not on her first try, but on her second.
Stories of women undertaking long-distance swims have dominated public eyes in recent years, from iconic crossings like the English Channel to record-breaking swims in remote and challenging waters.
This time, the 23-year-old local swimmer is not hesitant to share her story, a story of failing, she would say, but never mind.
“The thing is, failing this time means that it makes for a better story in the long run,” she said.
The decision came around about two years ago when the swimmer realised it was actually not worth it to climb Mount Everest.
“I went down a Mount Everest rabbit hole. Maybe I can do that. And then I went, the only reason I would do it is to satisfy curiosity. It’s not worth it. I’m not a mountaineer. That’s stupid,” she said when she thought of how this all started.
“Well, what’s my thing? My thing’s swimming. I’ve been swimming competitively for 15 years.”
What’s equivalent to climbing Mount Everest in the swimming field? That’s a question for Bethany.
She had been hearing about channel swimming for a long time. Of course, she wanted to do it, but initially, she was really scared of jellyfish.
She got over that and learned to deal with whatever animals were out there.
Two associations organise channel swims. Bethany sent out emails in early April this year to ask for a spot in 2026.
“One got back to me, and he goes, I’ve got no space for 2026, but I have a spot in June 2025, if you would like it, let me know quickly because I’m going to offer it to other people,” she recalled.
“I went, well, I was going to do it, but, like, why not do it earlier?
“For the crew, because it was earlier than I’d planned, the people who were originally going to come with me couldn’t.
“I was lucky that my best friend could come and her boyfriend. My mom’s cousin drove down from Nottingham.”
The narrowest point of the channel, if you just go directly across, is 32 kilometres.
When swimmers cross the English Channel, they don’t swim in a straight line from England to France because of strong tidal currents. These currents push swimmers sideways, so the actual path taken looks like a stretched-out “S” on a map. It can end up being over 50 kilometres of swimming.
Bethany put aside a window of three weeks for the endeavour, at the mercy of weather conditions, but she got lucky. She swam the very first day of her swim window.
Looking back, she would say the most challenging part is the prolonged cold, and it does kinda get boring.
“I’m definitely ready for the channel because I know how to manage the cold. It was colder in the channel than it would even be normally at that time of the year. But because the temperature stayed the same the whole time, you get used to it,” Bethany said.
“Once I got into French waters, for some reason, it got really patchy, so some bits would be warm, some bits would be cold, which made it so much more uncomfortable…
“Frankly, you look down and you can’t see the bottom. It’s too deep. You’ve just got water in front of you. And when you’re right in the middle, you can’t see England and you can’t see France.
“It’s hard to hear from the boat. Conversation is not going to happen…It gets really boring because you’re all on your own in the middle, and nothing to look at. Sometimes a ship would pass, and that would be fun. Otherwise, it’s like there’s nothing.”
That mental solitude did turn out to be as challenging as the cold.
“In the past, I’ve been really good at zoning out,” Bethany said.
“But this time, I couldn’t switch off.”
She found herself unusually alert the whole way, hyperaware of her body, the cold, the jellyfish, and how long everything was taking.
“It makes it a lot harder when you’re aware of how much it sucks, how much it hurts, and how cold you are,” she said.
So what keeps her coming back to something that she freely admits is, at times, cold, painful, and yes, boring?
“Well, for starters, I’ve got to finish it and tick the box,” Bethany said.
But it runs deeper than just unfinished business.
“It’s a hard thing to explain. When you work for something and you achieve it, that feeling is so good. It’s almost addictive,” she said.
“It’s satisfying. It’s like that moment of, I did that thing, and just being proud of yourself.
“Competitive swimming and ultra marathon swimming are hard in different ways, but the thing with the channel swimming is I can just keep going until it’s done, and it doesn’t matter how fast I go.”
She cited British open-water legend Ross Edgley, who became the first person to swim all the way around mainland Great Britain in 2018, covering 2860 kilometres in 157 days.
“His thing was naive enough to start, stubborn enough to finish, and that pretty much was me,” she said.
“If I decide I’m doing something, I’m going to do it. No one’s going to stop me. It’s a weird thing, it kind of sucked, but it was kind of fun, and at the end it’s worth it.
“I didn’t get that feeling so much this time around because I didn’t get that moment.
“I’ll go back and do it again, hit land, and I’ll feel good for doing that.”
