The big swim

Well, not that big. But Leander did it. And so did Byron. And now Thomas Hodgkinson is determined to conquer the Hellespont
It's important to distinguish between this and a really difficult swim. The first Channel crossing took almost 22 hours. Byron did the Hellespont in an hour and 10 minutes. On the other hand, Byron failed on his first attempt - and the lengendary Leander drowned on the crossing. The Hellespont, more commonly known as the Dardanelles, is the thin strip of water that cuts between the Aegean and the Sea of Marmara, and which therefore makes up part of the straits that separate Europe from Asia. According to the ancients, Leander was the doomed young buck who swam across each night to see his girlfriend, Hero. That was until Hero's torch blew out in a storm and, unguided, Leander was smashed against the rocks. When she discovered his body, Hero did the decent thing and flung herself off a cliff.

These combined associations of love, death and hard physical exercise were undoubtedly what prompted the young poet Lord Byron to pause on his gap year of 1810, and knock off the crossing that made him famous.

I, however, was motivated more by boredom. Anzac Tours is the only company that will organise a Hellespont swim - you cannot swim it alone - and there are a handful of takers each year. You rise at 5am from your hotel and are boated to Abydos point, some two miles upstream, where you drink hot tea without milk and wait for heavy steamers and cargo boats to get out of the way. The sun hangs low in the north-east as you cake yourself in Vaseline, with a helping hand from Huseyin Uluarslan, the owner of the tour company.

The water is deep and murky, and as you start to swim you see a jellyfish drift past, ghostlike, a couple of feet beneath you. Even if you swim breaststroke - as I did, as Byron did, as Leander no doubt did - your head is in the water half the time. Your goggles mist up.

The middle section is the lonely part, when you don't know how far you have come or how far you have still to go. There is slight cramp in your left hand and in your left leg, above the ankle. There is an ache in the small of your back. You try not to think about sharks, although a contact in Istanbul warned me that the Hellespont was infested with hammerheads, before adding: "No Turk would ever do this."

The swim is not done straight across, on account of the strong current. This, if anything, is what makes it hard. You do the first two-thirds heading diagonally upstream, and then cut a left turn of almost 90 degrees at a signal from Huseyin on the boat. Although the current is now at its strongest, the swim from here is the easiest, because it's the last bit. When you sneak a glimpse, you find that you are close enough to count the windows of a coach making its way along the coast road.

You start to see the reeds on the sea bottom. You put your feet down to stand, but find the water is still too deep. You swim on, until you can almost touch land with your hands, and then you stand, emerging suddenly and clumsily from water that only comes up to your thighs. There is a tiny ruined castle on shore, and you climb up on to it and stand on the crumbling wall and make a victory sign, and your boat hoots in reply. The sun is up now. It's warm, and the sea is blue.

My time was one hour 15 minutes, which Huseyin says is the fastest he has known, though I suspect he says that to all the boys. (His companion, a Captain Ekenhead, beat him by five minutes.) Despite and because of his club foot, Byron was a good swimmer. The deformity that prevented his taking part in other sports encouraged him into the water. He did longer swims, yet after completing the Hellespont crossing, he said: "I plume myself on this achievement more than I could possibly do any kind of glory, political, poetical, or rhetorical."

What made him so proud? Certainly, all his life, Byron enjoyed emphasising his essence as a doer of deeds rather than a writer of words. Without doubt, his physical disability added to his satisfaction. But having completed the swim myself, I find it hard to believe that Byron could seriously have attributed so much significance to it. In fact, he schooled his manservant to lie about the distance of the crossing when the subject came up in conversation. "Fletcher," he would say, "how far was it that Mr Ekenhead and I swam?" And Fletcher would solemnly reply: "Three miles and a half, my Lord."

If anyone is interested in a real challenge, they should attempt to do what Leander supposedly did every night until his unhappy end: swim one way, have sex with someone, then swim back. I couldn't find any takers for the sex part, and Huseyin said that the current makes the return journey dangerous, but I can't believe it's not possible.

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