The swim for Calum’s Cabin

On the day (22nd August 2010) that Tony Greener, UK Fleet Group Manager for Maersk, swam from the head of Loch Striven in aid of Rothesay charity, Calum’s Cabin, the loch delivered its familiar trick. Rain mist and poor to dreadful visibility finished with a no-nonsense downpour.

Tony’s connection with the area comes from his work with the Maersk ships on a year-long lay up in the loch, finishing with the departure of the last two, Bentonville and Brooklyn, on 1st July 2010.

Calum’s Cabin is the inspirational charity Tony Greener got to know about when it was the principal recipient of the fund Maersk distributed to a range of local charities and good causes during the stay of their ships in Loch Striven, The total fund was made up of the location fee the BBC paid to Maersk for permission to shoot the new CBBC sci-fi series, Missin 2010, onboard the ships and a donation from the company itself.

Calum’s Cabin commemorates the life of 13 year-old Rothesay boy, Calum Spiers who died from a brain tumour in February 2007. It is a lovely house in a tranquil place on the Mount Stuart Estate in Bute, built from funds raised by the Spiers family and friends.

It offers free holidays to families in the same position as the Spiers were such a short time ago, with a child suffering from terminal cancer. Continual fundraising is therefore the work of the charity to cover the costs of these family time-out holidays together.

The swim challenge

Tony Greener, at the age of 52 and not long returned from decades away from competitive swimming, has become one of the leading UK contenders in wild swimming events – or open water swimming, as it is properly known.

He saw yesterday as a point of intersection between the ongoing work of Calum’s Cabin, born from a challenge few of us can imagine, with a challenge he had set himself: to swim twice as far as he had ever done to contribute to the charity the remarkable Calum Spiers had himself envisaged.

The longest swim Tony had done before yesterday was 5 kilometres. His planned route from the head of Loch Striven to the point where the Maersk ships had been anchored, at Inverchaolain, off Mary and Jim Lamb’s house, the Clan Lamont Centre – was 10 kilmoetres.

It turned out to be 10.5 kilometres, swum in water of 12-14 degrees, with a nasty, wind-riven choppy stretch midway and in poor visibility throughout.

Of this, only the choppy stretch mattered to Tony as it made his swimming much more difficult. He had predicted this and it was the element of the swim he expected to be the most challenging.

The swim

We were to meet at the head of the loch. The Maersk workboat, christened the Baby B and now doing duty with Maersk Maryland and Maersk Maine laid up in the James Watt Dock in Greenock, appeared out of the mist just at around 12.20pm.

Aboard were Tony, of course; his two daughters Caitlin and Sam, cheering on their father; Neville, on the support team; and Stephen Burt, Locations and Production Manager for Mission 2110 and an honorary member of the crew of the Maersk raft, today in charge of the support boat.

Tony jumped into the water not far offshore, howled as the cold him with an ‘I can’t do this’, drifting ashore.  This was pure  theatre, of course, what he felt would be expected of him by wimps like us.

He waded in to the stony beach for a quick chat before setting off on what must be a very intense and self-contained experience.

While we talked the boat went astern to clear the inshore weed and to wait for Tony.

And he was off – but did a swim past for us (lead photograph) before turning to head for the boat. All he had to do was hand to the team the protective shoes he had worn to come to talk to us – and the challenge was on.

Wearing a wetsuit for protection, his feet were the most exposed part of Tony’s body but when he came ashore afterwards, he said that they had never felt cold.

He reported right shoulder strain at around the half-way mark but carried on and saw it vanish.

An unexpected pest was a flotilla of jellyfish. At one point his bare hand touched one on the downstroke. He said the jelly feel of it was a disgusting shock to the system – and the creature responded in kind. The flesh mound on the palm of his left hand below the thumb was clearly swollen with a sting when he came up the beach at the end of the swim.

A surprise to him as well as to us was the change of waters on the swim. Evidently the water from the head of the loch is fresh and sweet but becomes progressively brackish as the sea loch asserts itself.

From the point where Tony was almost invisible near the increasingly tiny support boat, we knew nothing of his swim until he appeared three hours and 10.5 kilometres later, on the gravel beach at the Clan Lamont house, the old manse where Jim and Mary Lamb live.

The waiting

While Tony swam for Calum Spiers, we drove back down Glen Lean, then south through Dunoon, Innellan and Toward to come in north to the arrival point in Glen Striven at Inverchaolain.

At Toward Yacht Club, the bulk of a naval RFA loomed between there and Rothesay. The rain mist was too dense to see her number, her transponder was off and not identifying her on AIS,  so she remains anonymous.

At the entrance to Loch Striven the view from the Nato jetty at Fort Lamont towards the head of the Loch showed the conditions in which Tony Greener was swimming.

We kept a lookout from the shelter of a tree at the height of the churchyard at Inverchaolin Church, the focus for some of the distress in the early part of this saga.

The back story

We’re in Clan Lamont territory here and a Lamont bride, Sara, the daughter of Robert the current Clan Chief, had her wedding plans thrown into disarray when, with  no community consultation at all, the private sector statutory harbour authority, Clydeport, threw the Maersk ships into Loch Striven at this very point.

At the beginning, with their accommodation blocks rising from the hulls, together amounting to  multi-storey blocks of flats and, at first, with their engines running and lights on, the ships made a floating village that was literally on the doorsteps of the small community – and of Inverchaolain Church (below).

A wedding in such circumstances would have been far from the idyll Sara Lamont, a Brussels-based commercial lawyer, had envisaged. The dispute was muscular but the brutish Clydeport kicked everything into touch and never once talked to the community.

Maersk, however, once the company got wind of the situation they had been hurled into, proved a very different business with a very different professional ethos. The company swiftly built good relations with the local communities, constantly tweaking lay-up operations on the ships to reduce their impact. It was this work, among other, which centrally involved Tony Greener.

In the end, Maersk could run the entire raft from the generators of a single ‘warm’ ship – and the development of the systems to make this possible was a significant cost to the company. This really was corporate social responsibility at work.

The ships and their crew became part of local life for the duration – particularly the almost constantly present Skipper of the raft, Captain David Johnstone, now in the Far East with Maersk Brooklyn, the last ship to leave.

Waiting under the tree in Inverchaolain churchyard for Tony Greener’s adventurous, imaginative and wonderfully generous postscript to this narrative, its history did a fast forward through memory in the mist.

In the tranquillity of these solitary moments, all of the elements of the story came into alignment.

Clydeport apart – and they are the losers in this – the story has been a positive and affirming one, testimony to the humanity and goodwill of the local residents, of Maersk and of the crew on the ships.

The reception and the arrival

Mary Lamb waited patiently for the first speck of substance in the mist.

With visibility down to almost nothing and the skies chucking it down, Mary, as ever, could be relied upon to come up with some left-field delights.

Waiting with Mary were her long-time Clan Lamont friends from the Netherlands, the De Vries family, with Carola and Erik seen above.

Hank, Carola’s brother, is a piper in the Clan Lamont Friendship Pipe Band, and the De Vries family were there on the beach to greet the Baby B and its precious charge in the water.

Hank, seen above with Jim Lamb, gave it Scotland the Brave while Mary, who had done a quick change of clothes, teetered down the stony, weed-strewn beach in her signature red stilettos, with knowing self-parody and a beaming smile.

Stephen Burt had to agree to get into the water himself and do the last 50 yards or so with Tony. At this stage the rain was so heavy that the camera was packing up so we couldn’t get a shot of it – but the support crew mischievously aborted a dodge of Stephen’s.

Once in the water he had taken a sneaky rest by clinging to the bow of the boat. Neville gunned the engine and took Stephen for a brisk splash in the bow wave until the pride of Mallaig gave up and swam for the shore.

They clambered on to the beach to the warmest of welcomes, Tony, like an actor caught between two worlds in a curtain call, not yet ‘back’ from the internal world he had lived in during this adventure. Stephen described his swim as ‘metronomic’. On the loch shore, Tony was being sociable while clearly needing to be alone to digest the experience only he really knew.

A celebratory dram in the Lamb’s kitchen and Tony, with Stephen, returned to swim out to the waiting Baby B to return to their overnight base in Rothesay.

They will be back. These friendships are very real. Stephen promised a swim from Rothesay next time – for Tony.

And the echo of Hank’s piping of Scotland the Brave was for Calum Spiers, Calum’s Cabin and all who rest in her.

Donations

Tony Greener has already raised over £2,100 for Calum’s Cabin. Maersk emailed their ships about the swim and 22% of the total raised was donated by the crew of Maersk Brooklyn, under Captain David Johnstone. Maersk Kithira, known to Tony Greener but not to Loch Striven, also made a donation.

You can still donate to this fundamentally important charity through celebrating Tony Greener’s gesture and his personal achievement.

The charity account for Tony Greener’s event will remain open at the secure online donations website, Just Giving, for a little longer.

Please contribute to it.

Photographs presently accompanying this article are copyrighted to For Argyll.We hope to add some more later – Stephen Burt took some shots form the boat and has offered to give us some.