By LUKE VOOGT
OCEAN Grove bricklayer Travis Lamb and his daughter Maddie will take on the cold waters of the English Channel this July.
Travis said he was impressed by his 14-year-old daughter’s determination to swim the channel.
“She’s the reason I’m doing it,” he said.
The pair will join a five-person relay team for the crossing, which includes Travis’s brother – a swim coach from Warrnambool – and his niece.
Maddie said she can’t wait to jump in the channel with her cousin.
“I thought it would be a pretty cool thing to do with her,” she said.
The team will swim across the channel to France and back again to England on 8 July, in roughly 24 hours.
Each person on the team will swim an hour at a time, covering about 3.5 kilometres.
Travis and Maddie have been training for the last 18 months at local beaches and will fly to England in a few weeks.
Travis said the ocean here is roughly the same temperature in winter as the English Channel in summer, making it perfect to train in.
“It’s taken some time to acclimatise though,” he said.
Travis and Maddie have been doing two open-water swims and four pool sessions a week in preparation for the crossing.
The two Ocean Grove Surf Lifesaving Club members said open-water swims are great “chill-out time”.
“It clears your head,” Maddie said.
“No-one can annoy you out there,” Travis added.
