Hot pink speedos and a race that wasn't

Slowly getting over the jet lag but I'm enjoying being back in Melbourne. It's been a busy week, what with fitting in swim sessions, work and catching up on lost sleep. The highlight of the week was joining in with the 'icebergers' at Black Rock on Saturday morning. These are a group of seriously experienced open water swimmers with half a dozen or more Channel swimmers among them. I turned up at the beach at 8am ready for a good ocean swim and met Alby Bardoel and the gang. We headed down to the beach and as we prepared to hit the water I revealed my latest swimming purchase - a pair of fluro pink budgy smugglers. Possibly not the most conservative swim wear I possess. Alby politely pointed out that we were on a stretch of beach famous for it's male activity and I might attract more attention than I had anticipated. Nearly 2 hours later I exited the warm (19 degrees) water into a tropical downpour to find my towel and clothes now as damp as my speedos. Over breakfast I was advised that I needed to put on about 10kgs of weight if I hope to stave off hypothermia in the channel. This is a daunting prospect as so far this year I have managed to gain a total of minus 0.5kg.
Sunday morning was the Bonbeach 1.2km ocean race. I had been looking forward to this, the last race of the Melbourne open water calender. I arrived in good time to see the wind had whipped up the normally placed bay water into a sizeable white tipped swell. Excited by the prospect of a challenging sea swim I was rapidly deflated to learn that the life guards had cancelled the swim on safety grounds. I packed my pink smugglers away and slopped off to the pool for a steady 4.5km workout. The race has been rescheduled for 2 weeks so I may yet get a chance to race against the wetsuits. The prospect of beating as many wetsuitted swimmers as possible in a pair of fluoro pink budgy smugglers is quite an appealing one, even if I do risk being 'outed' in public. Also if I am going to prance around in a pair of eye-catching dick togs I might as well do it now while I am relatively trim and not when I have an extra 10kgs of lard folded over the top of them.