It was a BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) for 30 years and now UNE alumni Charlie Pidcock has achieved it. He has crossed the English Channel.
The feat took 12 hours and 21 minutes and 54-year-old Charlie walked onto French soil feeling like he had “been through a mincer”.
“But I took inspiration from former UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who famously said: ‘If you are going through hell, keep going’,” he said.“It was as hard as I thought it would be, but I handled it better than I thought I would.”
Charlie is now recovering from the swim across one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes with a family holiday, pleased to have ticked the BHAG off his bucket list.
“The day before I started, I was on the beach in England chatting to a coach with aspiring swimmers in the water and asked him for a last-minute tip.” Charlie said. “He questioned me a bit about my training and feeding plans, who my support crew and boat skipper were, mentioned the weather forecast, and then said, ‘you’ve done all the hard work, just go swim it’. A sense of peace and destiny came over me, so I did.
“It seems surreal and maybe a bit arrogant, but I knew when I stood on the shores in front of the white cliffs of Dover that I was going to get to France.”
The sales trainer and coach is grateful to his support crew, which included his 23-year-old son Henry and his brothers Brendan and Michael.
“Successfully swimming the English Channel is never a one person thing. I’ve been fortunate to have a great support team with me every step of the way,” Charlie said.
And his inspiration: “I want my kids (Henry and 21-year-old Scarlet, who is undertaking her Agricultural Science degree at UNE and living in St Albert’s, where Charlie met his future wife Trudy Grover) to lead full lives and I’m keen to demonstrate to them that if you set a goal and work really, really hard towards that goal, you can achieve extraordinary things.”
Congratulations, Charlie, from all your UNE friends.
