This week 50,000 revellers board the Isle of Wight ferry to see the Cure, Björk, Primal Scream and Groove Armada play the summer's last big festival, Bestival. But spare a thought for the 12 of us – I'll be swimming there with my friend Andrew Hudson – dipping our toes in the Solent for the annual charity Swim2Bestival, perhaps coming to the cold realisation that there's a good reason 49,988 people prefer the ferry to swimming across the 6km stretch of sea.
Bestival is often considered Britain's most eccentric mainstream festival (this year, the Village People will be judging everyone's fancy-dress costumes), but most festival-goers will still wonder what attracts swimmers to a front-crawl dash across one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, serving both Portsmouth and Southampton. The dark Solent, with its treacherous double tide and unpredictable currents, can reach five knots and has caused 4,000 shipwrecks.
Simon Ratcliffe of Basement Jaxx, who completed the swim from Gosport to Ryde last year in a tidy 86 minutes, has an answer. "It's such a buzz when you finish," he tells me. "So different from swimming in your warm, packed leisure centre pool, a granny's foot in your face. I immediately started planning my next swim."
Indeed, Ratcliffe has just returned from swimming the 5km from Europe to Asia, across the Hellespont in Turkey.
He has not always been as gung-ho. "The enormity of it scared me before the swim," says Ratcliffe. "It's a shipping channel with big ships on top, big dark depths below, and me, this little thing, splashing around. But on the day I was fine."
He's not the only one taking the plunge. My ferry-dodging has been put to shame by 70-year-old Roger Allsopp's cross-channel swim last week, while Ronan Keating and Pamela Stephenson recently battled giant jellyfish in the Irish Sea – and David Walliams sets off down the Thames tomorrow. In fact, I reckon I'll be swimming one of the few stretches of open water not infested by celebrities.
