Safety Cover – Seahorse Swim

Our 4th Safety Cover event of the year so far took place on Sunday 3rd July at Knoll Beach – Studland for more than 200 swimmers taking to the water for the Annual Seahorse Swim organised by EDOWSC (East Dorset Open Water Swimming Club).

This time we were keenly aided by our neighbouring club Branksome Chine Surf Life Saving Club as well as RLSS Boscombe Lifeguards from the other side of Poole Bay who both came along with their Resceu Boats, paddlers and shore walkers.

Click on the photo below to see all 20 of them.

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The course was a 2Km diamond shape using 4 turn buoys; this enabled the swimmers to either swim a 1 lap race – 2Km or a 2 lap race which was 3.8km.

To provide adequate safety cover for this event meant we needed 5 x Safety Boats, 18 paddlers and 4 Shore Walkers. This meant that we had a total of 32 volunteers forming the waterborne safety team.

The level of cover that we have become renown for, enables all the swimmers to feel very safe at all times around the course despite being at least 500m off shore at the most seaward point. This has been reflected by the number of positive comments via feedback received by EDOWSC and passed on to us.
The weather forecast leading up to the swim had been horrible all week and the organisers were thinking that they may have to cancel it at one point. But as the week drew to an end, the winds subsided, the rain stayed away and we ended up have very good conditions for the swim.

In total 201 swimmers took to the water and apart from a few that retired after lap 1 and one who got cramp, there were no incidents and judging by the smile on the face of the swimmers as they got out, they all thoroughly enjoyed themselves. So congratulations to EDOWSC on another very well organised event.

We are extremely grateful and appreciative to have such a good relationship with our fellow lifeguard clubs, because we know that without them, events like these would not be able to take place.

I would like to mention that we all really do appreciate everyone getting up at silly o’clock (05:00hrs) on a Sunday morning to make all this happen, even though some of the youngster are light weights and could not cope with the early start 🙂

Thank You!

A huge thank you to all the volunteers named below for helping make this anoher huge success.