Well the all important phone call arrived at 7:30pm this evening and Philip told me that it is too close to call. The wind is meant to be settling down tomorrow but they want to make sure that it is. They are going to call me at 7:30am to confirm if it has and whether we are off or not. If it is to go ahead I will be looking to get into the water around midday, this will mean that I will finish just short of midnight! I will therefore have 2-3 hours of darkness at the end.
I really hope I get the go ahead as I can't start to describe how stressful it is. For the past few days, I have been feeling so sick with nerves from about 3pm, I haven't been the best company-dad and Aidan have been great. After the phone calls I have been a bit glum. However tonight I am feeling positive and hopeful. I never thought that I would be so desperate to jump into the sea and do an 11 hour swim, Freda has to nag me to do a 6 hour at Dover!
I am not swimming on a spring tide but it is on the change from a neap to a spring and so Philip is making sure that all the conditions will be working with me before putting me in. He has said that he would rather send me home dry and with my money than line me up to instantly fail. I DO NOT want to come home without doing this, this is something that I have trained for for 2 years and to not even be given a chance would be awful. Please keep your fingers crossed for me and watch this space in 12 hours!
Apart from feeling sick with nerves, we took our minds off of swimming today, we headed out of Wellington for a change of scenary and visited Cape Palliser. It is the South Eastern point of North Island and is home to New Zealands largest seal colony. We had lunch on a beach with seals! They were huge, all basking on rocks, drying themselves out from the sea and itching their flabby bellies and back on the rocks! We saw a few out at sea porpoising (jumping out of the water and diving back in head first), one particular bull was the boss and was ordering the others to move rocks, there was a verbal argument, a show of canines and then the other one slumped off in a sulk. It was amazing to be able to get so close to them.
After lunch we went for a bush walk, it took a couple of hours and climbed high through the forest until we were up on the cliffs, here we were able to look across and see the South Island, it was a grey haze but at least I could see my swim destination, and the gap that we were looking at is much wider than my actual swim. We walked a little further and came to the Putangirua pinnacles. These pinnacles were used in Lord of the Rings (apparently horses gallop away from them?-I haven't seen any of the films). They were fascinating, huge rock formations created 120,000 years ago by heavy rain eroding away an ancient gravel deposit. They are huge grey towers of all different shapes and sizes, it was well worth a look.
Anyway I am off to bed now as hopefully I will be needing a good nights sleep for the big adventure tomorrow.
Enjoy a few pics from today:
Sun worshipper
Oi, that's my rock!
Dad amongst the Pinnacles
This is probably how I will spend tonight................................ restless!
GOODNIGHT!
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