My name is Ceinwen Roberts and I’m a marathon open water swimmer.

I grew up swimming in our family pool during the summer. And eventually Mum and Dad put me into a little swim squad in the local pool. So I learned to swim there and that’s where it started, and kind of my passion for swimming and pushing myself and working hard and getting results through swimming, just started back in this little local pool up in the hills of Perth.

The Rottnest swim is a 20km swim from Cottesloe Beach to Rottnest Island. So you’re allowed to paddlers and a support boat, but during that swim, you’re not allowed to touch anyone or anything. So it’s a nonstop swim. You can stop whenever you want to be passed fluids, water, drinks, food, but other than that, there’s no stopping until you get there.

So basically, I kind of set up a training program for me about a year out. I knew to achieve this, and to do it well, I had to make myself a little plan, and progress. Not just physically fit but mentally fit as well. Yeah, it involved swimming five to ten times a week in the pool, and then the ocean, and just kind of getting myself focused in my mind as well, of what am I going to think about for five, six hours? What am I going to think about if I’m getting sick or cold or I’m in a lot of pain? You know, how am I going to stop myself from stopping and giving up? I made the swim, I did it really well and then came third female overall so yeah, I just really felt good. I ran up the beach I almost thought, oh, I’ve maybe got a bit too much energy leftover. You know, I could have gotten harder, and I think that’s what made me do it again the next year because I wanted to see what how much more I could push myself. So since then I’ve done, I can’t even count how many solos I’ve done.

So one year I had a really bad experience where right from about an hour in, I started vomiting and just felt lethargic, and then I got upset because I thought ‘Why is this happening already? You know, I’m going terribly. I’m not going to make it,’ and I was vomiting so I couldn’t hold any food down. And anyway, I got to the other end, and I had come third again. And I’d done pretty similar time to the year before. And I kind of thought, why have I just wasted that whole day that whole year of training, being upset and negative when I was actually going okay? You know, having experiences like that has taught me, all right. If I get that thought, a negative thought in my head, get it out of there straightaway and prepare myself with some positive, happy things or a way to manage those negative thoughts and overcome it so that I can carry on.

I can spend this next ten, twenty hours worrying about what’s beneath, and what could happen, or it might not happen and I can just have a great time and really enjoy this experience. Because yes, it could happen. Everyone says, you know, ‘You’ll get eaten by a shark if you swim too many times in that in that crossing, between Cottesloe and Rottnest.’ But yeah, it could happen, and it could happen if you’re in knee deep water as it did, you know, a couple of years ago at North Cottesloe, so I kind of think if your time’s up, it’s up, and carry on with living your life and doing what you love in the meantime.

No one else had ever attempted a Rottnest triple crossing. A lot of people had done a double crossing, there and back, but no one had done the triple crossing. So my friend and I decided it was time someone gave it a go. So we were standing there, on the edge of an island, Rottnest Island in Thompsons Bay. It was very rough. It’s very windy, we could hardly hear each other when we’re talking and our boats and paddlers were waiting out for us, and we stepped off into the dark water. I mean, even just if anyone’s gone skinny dipping before in the middle of the night, you know that that’s a little bit of a rush and you only really tend to go, you know, waist deep and run back in again. So to actually think I’m going to swim 20km across this channel, which it is full of sharks, there had been multiple sightings and, you know, just in pitch black water, you don’t know what’s around you or what’s near you. So it was terrifying, but exhilarating at the same time. Just took my breath away. And I actually had a big smile on my face. So I must sound like an absolute freak. But I think that’s the only way that you can handle a situation as extreme as that, is with extreme feelings of excitement and positivity.

We have paddlers next to us, watching us and keeping an eye out, you know, we had lights on our bathers, and my husband was had a big head torch on his head and the beam of light was shining into the water. So it was just darkness and this one beam of light. And the little fishes were attracted to that. So I’m seeing beautiful fishes underneath the water, and they were flying fish flying out of the water, which I could just see in the starlight. It was ridiculously rough. So I couldn’t even see when a wave was coming up and down and hitting me, so I was getting tossed all over the place but I just thought, you only live once and just make the most of it. So it was the craziest thing I’ve ever done but the most amazing adventure as well.

After the end of that first lap. So we approached Cottesloe just as the sun was rising, so I was quite cold. And because I’d got tossed around so much, my arms were being flung everywhere, my shoulders and my neck, my back were absolute in agony. I felt like I had 50 knives stabbed in my back, and I just thought oh my gosh, I can’t even take one more stroke let alone turn around, swim another 20km and then turn around and swim another 20km. But we got to the beach and there was so many people there cheering us up, to cheer us on and wish as well, and I just thought oh my gosh, so much has gone into this. I took a few Panadol and turned around and kept going and just took it stroke by stroke. As the sun came up and it got warmer and I stretched out a bit and just thought of what I was doing it for.

We were doing it to raise awareness for Walk Free. Their mission is to try and end modern day slavery. And so I kind of focused on that and just thought, look, get over yourself. You know, there’s people having to work against their will as slaves, you know, and in domestic situations, and all over the world, you know, child slavery, and so I kind of focused on that and just, you know, pushed on thinking how lucky I actually was to even be there.

My tongue had swollen up so much from the saltwater and my tongue and my throat, because it was so rough, that I actually couldn’t ingest any more fluids. It was just absolute like razor blades to swallow or eat anything. So I hadn’t eaten anything for quite some hours and as we were approaching Cottesloe Beach, so it was the last, you know, we’d swam 58km and we had a few kilometres to go, and I could see the beach and kind of hear it, start to hear all this chanting and I realised it was the people on the beach, waiting for us to come in.

And then I saw these white swans on the ocean, and I thought, oh my gosh, how amazing they’ve brought out white swans to greet me in. But then they soon just disappeared. I thought okay, that was a hallucination. And then there were a few other things that I was, kind of started to, obviously daydream. I thought it was the Rottnest pub, on Cottesloe Beach, but obviously it was Cottesloe. There was a brown liquid on the surface of the ocean that I thought was chocolate, so I opened my mouth and I tried to drink a bit of it, but it was just salt water. So yes, obviously my sugar levels were very low and I was starting to hallucinate and I think I just made it in time.

Well, a lot of people have told me that, you know, once you become a mother, it’s not about you anymore, and you know, this kind of maternal protective instinct comes over you. I am kind of trying to prepare myself for that, because I do love putting myself out there and maybe being a bit risky, but I do realise that that’s probably going to change and I’m probably, you know, going to have this other person to think about and worry about, and I’m going to have to survive for them. And maybe doing swims in the middle of the night in shark infested waters, I might keep away from.