Well, the weather was shit 
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Not bad for swimming though as it was pretty calm, but any spectators would have been utterly soaked.
Handy, big car park near to registration at the yacht club which was easiest to pay for by the “paybyphone” app as none of the 3 ticket machines were accepting my money…£2.20 for 4hrs.
The timing tracker was a fairly cumbersome unit & definitely wasn’t going to fit in a trisuit rear pocket. As wetsuit swimmers didn’t need to use a towfloat I decided to embrace the freedom & place it in the small of my back between my wettie & rash vest all the while hoping that it didn’t lacerate my wetsuit or lower back…all was good in the end. Water temp was comfortable enough for me to wear my thinner wetsuit & hopefully won’t drop too much in the next fortnight.
The idea of the event is that we swim 2km to an easily spotted outcrop with the tide & time it so that at this point the tide turns & we get a whooooosh back to the start.
Turn point.
The swim out was pretty good & with only 30 or so swimmers biffless. The only problem was that unaccustomed as I am to swimming at 1min/100mtrs the buoys & anchored boats came up on me fucking rapidly. The return was a bit more demanding as I didn’t benefit from the outgoing tide until the last 300mtrs.
I clocked myself at 59:25 & finished 8/27
After the swim I recced the final 3km of the run - in dogshit weather - that we’ll be doing for the Dyfi X Aquathlon. It was fairly well marked already as the SwimRunners were using it but definitely a trail shoe environment. Like you @d.t I’ve seen lots of runnable stuff on Streetview but with weather like I had today I would have been on my arse a lot.
All in all I enjoyed it & got to see a bit of the SwimRun event that was taking part at the same time & has got me thinking about things to do next year 