The event held on Friday, February 26 saw thousands of swimmers braving the open seas for the 20th crossing of the 19.7km from Cottesloe Beach to Rottnest Island.

The two-family team from Narembeen consisted of Jeff Hooper and his 14-year-old son Joel Hooper and Christine Arnold and her 19-year-old daughter Kaidee Arnold.

A total of 2300 swimmers, accompanied by 900 boats, competed in the race but the Narembeen team, calling themselves the ‘Fogies and Kids’, came 10th out of 73 teams in the 100+ category.

They even overtook some of the teams in the faster categories to come 115th out of 445 teams overall after taking six hours, 37 minutes and 32 seconds to complete the swim.

Conditions were better than had been feared, but still not the best, with swells of up 2m at the 10km mark, a rumoured plume from dredging in Fremantle Harbour and an unfavourable south westerly breeze.

The team swam in rotations of 10 minutes each for the first two hours then rotations of five minutes each.

For team member Chris Arnold, a lifelong swimmer, the crossing was her ninth, while for Kaidee it was the fifth crossing, for Jeff his second and for Joel his first.

“We used to have a team called ‘Narem Fridge Dwellers’, and we swam the channel eight years in a row,” Mrs Arnold said.

She commended her teammates on an excellent effort, particularly Joel for swimming strongly in his first crossing.

“The conditions, which started off not too bad, got progressively worse as the swell grew and the south westerly came in,” she said.

“However, it was evident that we were doing fairly well by the number of teams we were catching and passing.”

She said the team made the decision to enter the competition last November and had been training hard ever since despite each living in different places.

“Kaidee and Joel both trained in Perth with their swimming teams, I trained in Narembeen and Jeff practices in a small pool in his backyard in Muntadgin,” she said.

“I’ve been swimming all my life but Jeff only took it up in recent years which shows that anyone can do it,” she said.

A team of dedicated supporters helped the team make their crossing possible, including Russell Arnold and Rohan Ballard paddling, Ray Sedgwick as skipper of the Zodiac dinghy and David Phillips as skipper of the boat.

Mrs Arnold thanked all the volunteers who gave up their time to help the team accomplish the crossing.