MAY 27, 2026
From Robben Island to Big Bay: An Odyssey of Water, Will and Becoming
4 hours. 9,23kms. The island lies behind me now, that grey, storied rock that once held the world’s most famous prisoner, that once stood as the iron symbol of a nation’s long night.
The trip to the island from Table Bay, just after first light, had been one of the bumpiest I had experienced in many a year and I kept thinking to myself what in the world had possessed me to want to swim in this maelstrom of threatening, choppy water, capable of testing the resolve and breaking the very hearts of men made of much sterner stuff than me.
Nonetheless, I slipped off the boat into the freezing embrace of the foreboding ocean, pointed my body toward a distant shore I could not yet see, and I swam Through heaving, churning, freezing open water. For something I had dreamed of for years.
The temperature of the water was 16 degrees Celsius. The skies were low and grey, the visibility limited, the swell significant, and a formidable cross-current drove us back during the final stretch with a kind of cold, impersonal fury.
My Smart Watch tells me my heart beat at an average of 131 times per minute across those four hours. My spirit tells me something the watch cannot quite measure: that I left something out there in the deep water, and I brought something back that I did not have before.
People seem to think this is a pretty big deal. And slowly, in the forty-eight hours since I walked onto the sand at Big Bay, shook the hand of my partner, my comrade in arms, my fellow lunatic, I am beginning to think they may be right.
I had told myself, in the months of preparation, that the only distance I needed to complete was the six inches between my ears. I had trained myself, stroke by stroke and hour after hour in pool and sea, to silence the negative committee, that long-tenured board of inner critics which had occupied rent-free space in my head for decades. I believed I was ready for the challenge.
But belief and experience are different countries, and the crossing between them is not always straightforward.
It was the final stretch that tested everything. The cross-current caught us like a great, invisible hand and refused to let go. For what felt like an eternity, each stroke seemed to gain nothing. I was, quite literally, swimming in a washing machine, churned and buffeted, refusing to look up toward a shoreline, which I knew would seem like an unattainable destination. It would have been entirely reasonable to allow that realisation to erode what remained of my reserves.
Instead, I made a decision: I would not look at the shore. I fixed my eyes on the accompanying boat, concentrated on each individual breath, each single stroke, and refused to let my thoughts travel further than the next pull of water. The two men on the boat accompanying us deserve special mention. Connor and Guy were measured and steady in their advice and support and encouragement and their contribution to the ultimate success of our endeavour cannot be overemphasized.
And then something remarkable happened. My pace increased. Over that grinding final stretch, the hardest water of the day, I swam faster than I had swum in the opening hour. Not because my body was stronger, but because my mind had taken control. The negative committee had left the building. I was in the water with my own will, and my will was sufficient. The significance of that shift was not lost on me.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of my favourite wordsmiths, wrote:
“Be not the slave of your own past. Plunge into the sublime seas, dive deep and swim far, so you shall come back with self-respect, with new power, with an advanced experience that shall explain and overlook the old.”
I did not know, when I first encountered those words, that I would one day test them so literally. But there I was, in the sublime sea, diving deep, swimming far, and I realised that Emerson, that great prophet of the unconquered self, was right. You do come back with something new. You come back having overlooked and conquered the old.
In the middle of the crossing, without warning, a large pod of dolphins suddenly arrived. What seemed like hundreds of magnificent, shining silver bodies came bulleting past at extraordinary speeds, frolicking in the waves, surging around us with a kind of effortless, joyful power that made my own laboured strokes feel briefly absurd. When my head was submerged, I could hear them communicating, a language of clicks and song, ancient and intimate, carrying through the cold water like music from another world. They were among the sweetest sounds I have ever encountered.
These are shark-infested waters. There has never been a shark attack on a swimmer during one of these crossings. I am a hopeless romantic, and I will not apologise for choosing to believe that the dolphins are the reason. There is no evidence for this. There is, however, the evidence of my very creative imagination, and that is evidence I am prepared to trust. After all, what is a grand odyssey without a little mythology woven into its telling? The dolphins came. We were not harmed. I choose to believe they were there to protect us, and this belief costs me nothing and allows me to dream.
I swam with dolphins off the coast of Zanzibar eighteen months ago, warm water, infinite visibility, equatorial light flooding the sea. It was extraordinary. But this was entirely different: grey and cold and consequential, in the midst of genuine physical ordeal, in waters with history and weight. Those Zanzibar dolphins were a gift of pleasure. These were something closer to the Grace of God.
I forced myself not to look at the shoreline during that final stretch. When I finally allowed myself to raise my eyes and scan the beach, I could make out the vague figures of people waiting. And something in my chest opened.
On the sand were people very close to my heart, people who had taken time from their own busy day to stand in the grey cold and wait for me to come in. Among them, an elderly couple: both previous patients of mine, people with whom I have shared the long road of life-threatening illness, surgery and recovery. Seeing them there on that beach evoked emotions I cannot yet quite find words to describe. What a blessing to be met, at the end of such an ordeal, from people whose lives have intersected with mine in the most profound of ways.
And then, my son. The little boy with the curly blonde hair whom I have watched grow into a strapping young man, walked to meet me, his 6 foot 4 inch frame towering above me as he enveloped me in a bear hug, and I believe that what I saw on his normally reserved, handsome face was pride. A father is permitted these interpretations.
My daughter was not there in body. She is off bravely carving out her own life in the world, but she was there entirely in spirit, sitting somewhere far away with her eyes on a clock, waiting for news. And my father was there too. He did not survive to see this day, having lost his own battle with heart disease, but I carried him every stroke of those 9.2 kilometres, and I know with a certainty which requires no proof that he was watching from somewhere, feeling proud.
I spent much of my young life seeking my father’s approval. He was the most humble, most honest, most genuine, most authentic person I have ever known. A man shaped by the unimaginable ravages of a childhood lived through the Second World War in Nazi Germany, who carried those wounds quietly and yet managed, despite them, to live a life of unimpeachable integrity. In his final years, he never let an opportunity pass to tell me how proud he was of me. I heard it and did not yet believe I deserved it.
I believe it now. Not because of a swim, but because of what the swim represents: the culmination of a genuine interior journey, years of honest reckoning with my own considerable shortcomings, the slow and humbling work of becoming a man whose life, at last, has some measure of coherence between its private and its public faces. My father knew this was possible. He held the belief on my behalf until I could hold it myself. This crossing was for him.
And it was for the children. Those thousands of young lives held hostage by congenital and rheumatic heart disease in communities already overwhelmed by poverty and inequality, waiting for life-saving surgery that may never come in a world where heart disease kills more people than the six most common cancers combined, yet remains strangely invisible. I carried their cause into those cold waters and I carry it still. The swim raised awareness and funds for their cause, but the work is far from done. If anything, emerging from that water has only deepened the obligation I feel to do more.
And then, when the swim was over? A strange, quiet return to ordinary life. That always slightly anticlimactic moment when the extraordinary becomes the past and the present reasserts its gentle, mundane authority.
But something is different now. I feel it already. There is a quality to the light, a sense of invigorated possibility, that I do not remember feeling before. I find myself wondering what the next challenge will be, what the next great adventure of this marvellous, improbable journey called life might demand of me. I am motivated as I have seldom been motivated. I am grateful as I have seldom been grateful.
Completed: Robben Island to Big Bay Open Water Crossing
9.23km • 4 hours 3 minutes • 16°C • Cape Town, May 2026
Seneca wrote, in his letters: “ It is not that I am brave; it is that I know what is worth being afraid of . ” I was anxious going into that water, but now, a week later, the realisation is sinking in, ever so slowly, if I may be permitted to say, that it feels pretty damn good having conquered not just this stretch of open ocean, but a part of myself which has haunted me for so long.