BOG SNORKELLING
EXCERPT FROM TRUE BRITS ©JR DAESCHNER

Still nursing a hangover from last night, I suspect that immersion in sick-making bog water isn't going to do my stomach any favours.

Most hardcore snorkellers have come well prepared, sporting polar wetsuits with fitted flippers and scuba goggles.

All I've got is a T-shirt and swim trunks. Julia Galvin, the de facto Irish champion, kindly offers to lend me her lucky snorkel, and I scrounge a pair of flippers from another swimmer. I realise I'm in trouble when the guy has to tell me how to put the flippers on.
I'm Number 28 out of 51, and by the time I've figured out the complexities of attaching my flippers, it's my turn in the bog. So instead of doing the sensible thing and acclimatizing myself to the water, I splash right in. After all, it's summer, right?

Hoo-oo-oo! Ha-aaah!

Immediately, the blind animal panic pounces on me, the gelid water squeezing the air from my lungs and forcing a gasp of anguish through the strange tube in my mouth. It's summer all right, but it's summer in Wales.
And then it hits me-I know how to swim, but I don't know how to snorkel. And a bog probably isn't the best place to learn.

I'm in Wales, but the little white post at the end of the channel looks like it's somewhere over the border, forming a canal across Offa's Dyke right through England to the other side of the UK.

And that's only halfway! I've got to swim across Britain and back again!

Nevertheless, I plunge in ... and immediately sink. Frantic, I try to pull myself along the bottom, grabbing fistfuls of weeds and silty water, my flippers feeling five feet long as they dredge the bog, churning fitfully like paddlewheels stuck on a mud flat.

Technically, that isn't true. I'm definitely moving my arms; I'm just not getting anywhere.

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