Urban Mermaid

What. The. Hell?’ The 15 year-old cox cried, swiftly followed by the squeals of the seven rowers in her boat, as they passed me on the River Thames in Kingston. Craning their necks to look at me, they momentarily lost their rhythm, so I duck dived to the riverbed, flipped my tail in the air, and waved hello. Yes, that’s right, I was wearing a mermaid tail.

Two years beforehand, I was learning to free-dive in the balmier waters of Indonesia. I felt a sting to my hand and saw what looked like a little jellyfish blobbing away. Except, it wasn’t. It was a small piece of clear plastic and it had cut my hand. Hundreds of pieces of the non-degradable material were bobbing around miles from shore; I was surrounded. The nature I’d come to see was outnumbered by an infestation of man-made indestructible plastic. It was a devastating realisation.

Having recently finished walking Western Australia’s Rabbit Proof Fence I was also hungry for another adventure. Streams of mermaid photos started appearing on my Instagram feed, after I started following free-diving influencers. Britain wasn’t better with plastic pollution either and then an idea pinged into my head. ‘I’ll swim the length of the River Thames as a mermaid.’ It made total sense.

Whilst working in a bar in the Alps, I met Barbara de Moubray. I worked there to support myself as I wrote my book, and Bla was supplementing her main passion: turning waste into art sculptures.  ‘Do you reckon you could make a mermaid sculpture out of plastic bottles?’ I asked. And that was it, the expedition would be more than just a swim. Barbara also offered to be my support boat.

Samantha

Upcycling 600 plastic bottles, Barbara created a 6-foot mermaid sculpture, named Samantha. We planned to fill her with all the plastic we would find to show how we are choking our mermaids and creatures. The support of UK based eco brands also ensured that we would be as plastic-free as possible for our journey. My Zoggs swimsuits were made from recycled fishnets, our Finisterre jackets filled with recycled polyester and Wyatt & Jack made me a mermaid bag from an old bouncy castle, which of course held my And Keep toiletries.

November

‘We’ve got to ask…’ said the teacher from the Lechlade primary school, who’d come to wave us off at the start. ‘Why are you doing it now, after that glorious summer we had this year?’

A busy summer meant our only availability was November. I once ran from London to Manchester in December and thought I would be fine with the cold. Cold water is different, as I discovered when I went for a trial dip with Outdoor Swimmer writer Ella Chloe Foot, a couple days before I started. The 7-degree water temperature shocked me so much, that the following evening I was actually sick.

Those nerves didn’t disperse for almost a week. In the first three days we had to cover 10 miles a day to get to the next accommodation. That’s a lot with a mermaid tail and having been used to 17-degree water where I’d been living in Spain, it also took my body a while to acclimatise. Even wearing two wetsuits, two pairs of gloves and boots and a surfer’s hood I could only last for 45 minutes at a time in the beginning.

However, there was an upside to swimming in November. We got to experience the most spectacular displays of Autumnal colours and river wildlife all to ourselves. Until we reached Staines, we’d be lucky if we passed two boats a day. As the trees readied themselves for winter, their leaves dropped and would suspend beneath me, twinkling like flecks of gold. Bevvies of swans would escort us out each morning and skeins of Canada Geese would use the water before me as a run up before taking off right over my head. It was utterly mesmerising.

Thames Angels

“Hey, are you the Urban Mermaid?” came a voice from behind a Willow tree. “Mind if I join you?” Having heard us on the radio, Angus hunted us down in the middle of the Oxfordshire countryside.

Armoured with hoods and goggles we exchanged life stories over a casual breaststroke.  “Right, I’ll leave you here, I can’t last longer than 20 minutes,’ he said before he clambered out where the river bank dipped and then disappeared. Bla and I looked at each other and mouthed ‘WOW.’ The company of a stranger was a wonderful boost to our morale as the cold head wind tried to deflate it.

This was my first insight into the wild swimming community. I called them the Thames Angels. They bloomed from every meander, randomly appearing behind the reeds. People joined us to clean the river. A fireman, who was training in the river, gave me his glove when he’d heard I’d lost mine. In Abingdon, our accommodation fell through, and someone following our journey offered to put us up. They later joined us in the river several times and have now become good friends. It’s a magical community.

The cow

‘Mermaid saves cow in Thames,’ read the headline of a tabloid paper. We did indeed rescue a cow after finding the poor thing stuck in an Oxfordshire stretch of the river. The fire brigade hauled her out, reuniting her with her two calves. However, when Barbara spotted it she actually thought it was a giant white plastic bag caught in a bush, like she’d seen many times before. Her beady eyes enabled her to collect everything from lighters to toothbrushes to air mattresses to full packets of multi-bag crisps, as I mermaided alongside. City centres were inevitably the worst. I would wriggle into the reads that Bla’s canoe couldn’t get to, and scoop up to 40 plastic bottles in one spot. Often, we had to leave what we saw as Bla’s boat couldn’t contain it all.

We weren’t surprised that we could fill Samantha several times over. We recycled what we could and washed the rest to put in her. However we were pleasantly surprised at the cleanliness of Henley, Maidenhead and Windsor. It was due to people caring about their part of the river and clean up initiatives like Surfers Against Sewage’s Plastic Free Communities. 418 communities in the UK are now tackling avoidable single-use plastic from the river all the way back to the brands who created it. We noticed the difference where SAS was involved. Still, in the middle of the countryside, miles from any community, like where we found the poor cow, hundreds of pieces of plastic had made their way into the water.

On the 22nd day of mermaiding 120 miles of the Thames into Teddington Lock I felt a similar pang in my stomach as I did on our first morning. But, this time I was nervous about finishing. The Thames had become my home and I could now last for more than four hours in the water at a time. I very much miss the Thames, its wildlife and all it’s angels, but I don’t miss the amount of plastic that we saw. Ellen McArthur said there will be more plastic than fish in the sea by 2015, unless we do something about it. So, lets do more about it then. It’s not too late.