WHAT do you call a man with one leg who swims 35 miles round a Channel Island? You call him Jonty… and this is no joke.
Just before 5.45pm on Monday, Jonty Warneken tapped the St Helier Harbour wall and became the first amputee to swim around Jersey, completing the anti-clockwise lap of the Island in 11 hours and 33 minutes.
A few months before the 30th anniversary of the car crash which led to the loss of his left leg, Mr Warneken (52) fulfilled a pledge made after a meeting last year with one of Jersey’s most renowned swimmers, Sally Minty-Gravett.
“I was in Northern Ireland ahead of attempting the North Channel swim across to Scotland, and Sally was there with the Indian swimmer [Anshuman Jhingran] ahead of his swim across the same stretch,” Mr Warneken recalled.
“We got chatting, and Sally was pretty quick in ‘selling’ the idea to me – she said it was going to be the 50th anniversary of the Jersey Long Distance Swimming Club, and that no amputee had ever swum round the Island, and that was all it took really.”
In early September, the former rugby player was the first amputee to conquer the North Channel, which required 34.5 miles of swimming in the fast-moving currents across a straight line distance of 21.4 miles – and set his sights on Jersey.
Conditions were described as “perfect” as Mr Warneken removed his prosthetic limb and jumped off his support boat Sapho, piloted by Carlton Moody, at 6.09am to begin swimming.
“Jersey has magnificent swimming – you’re so lucky,” he said. “There’s great scenery most of the way round, which I could have admired if I breathed to the left – but I breathe to the right [to compensate for the missing leg] and so all I saw was the side of the boat.”
The hardest part of the swim was passing the south-west tip of the Island with around seven miles to go.
“Corbière was pretty lumpy, the waves were coming at me from the right and it was pretty tough on the arms and shoulders, but I just had to get my head down and get on with it,” he said.
Not long afterwards, after an escort from a pod of dolphins and having been joined in the water by his friend Kate Steels, herself an accomplished swimmer, the final strokes of the challenge were ticked off, with Mrs Minty-Gravett cheering on from the support boat.
“Having experienced people like Kate and Sally with me was invaluable. They were just keeping me focused and I think support like that can make or break a swim like this,” he said.
