Saturday 9th April West Bay 6.00

MG

I have spent 6 hours on a train since our last swim (yesterday morning), at least 5.5 of those spent staring out of the window and dreaming of the sea. So I'm overjoyed to be back and traversing the familiar road to West Bay for a swim with SW. The wind had got up during the day and a few blowsy clouds appeared, but by the time SW, his support team, the Mascot and I arrive at the beach, it is pretty settled with a light breeze and just a McFlurry of waves – exactly how I like it. We'd hoped to entice KH whose blinking light has appeared on our swim radar – her presence is promised for tomorrow.

SW is not quite so keen as I having had his chiller experience in Waitrose post swim yesterday and now feeling slightly below par. I cheerfully question whether it is hyperthermia – my support team has helpfully told me you can unexpectedly die four days later from it (surely not true?) If this is the case, SW still has two days left and might as well spend them swimming. We prance and cormorant as we chat, then I eventually plunge leaving SW to reluctantly follow.

The water is gin clear and as we've so often said, the little annoyances, anxieties and irritations trickle from my brain, down my body, and drip out through my fingers and toes. SW makes it a quick dip and I return too to remove my boots and try my first dip without. It is unbelievably liberating – I feel like I'm skinny dipping and dart off to pearl dive in the shallows (brain freeze) white toes flashing behind. As I'm cruising about a gull appears in the distance and swoops along the water straight at me in an extremely unnerving fashion. Our eyes meet and I duck underwater to avoid it's penetrating gaze. I emerge to see it wheeling around for a second go. This feels a bit more alarming than yesterday and my mind is full of horror stories of babies snatched from prams and pensioners eyes pecked out  ("they can make a furrow in your head" more helpful words of wisdom from the support team). I can see SW urgently searching for his camera as it must look quite impressive from the shore, but as SH later points out, it's like a Hitchcock-ian horror, and I reach the shallows in some relief. I'm clearly being divinely rebuked for mocking GW's pathological fear of sea gulls last year….

Changed and feeling a bit chilled we part at the car with promises to meet tomorrow. I calm my jangling nerves with a few episodes of the Archers; the gulls in Ambridge are as gentle as lemon curd on a hot cross bun.