I've mentioned this sort of holiday before and this year I am finally, definitely going to go for it. I suspect this will not be everyones/anyones cup of tea, but you never know so if you fancy it let me know, really quickly since I think it needs to be booked really quickly as there aren't many places left now.

It's really a swimming holiday, in the Inner Hebrides in September when, according to the tour company, the sea around lovely sunny Scotland is at it's warmest. As well as swimming it also involves some hiking and lots of camping.

The adventure begins on Jura where you being by swimming from one end of a big loch to the other and then hiking back to the campsite, hopefully in time to visit the nearby Whisky distillery. You camp each night so on the second day you hike to the coast and swim across the mouth of Loch Tarbert where it opens into the sea. After that there is a potentially very dangerous day where we swim across the infamous huge whirlpool of Corryvreckan as we swim from Jura to the next island along which is called Luing. The following days are spent hiking across two more islands and swimming between them until you get back to the mainland.

I am quite excited about it, I think it will either be a complete and utter living hell of pain, rain, cold and unending misery or really good fun. The longest swim is across the Loch and that's 4KM, the other ones are nearly all quite a lot shorter than that. You're followed around by a boat so you don't have to swim if, for instance, you get your leg bitten off by a shark, or you simply can't be bothered anymore and I think the people on the boat are all expert swimmers who will assess how well you are swimming and give you lots of help to improve your stroke. I don't think you even need to be especially proficient at swimming by the looks of it either since they grade people into 3 categories based on how quickly you can swim 1KM, one of the categories is over 40min which you could manage more or less just by floating. This is what I am hoping anyway !

http://www.swimtrek.com/trips-and-events/one-week-tours/scottish-inner-h...