Can this British guy really swim from New York City to London? - Los Angeles Times
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Can this British guy really swim from New York City to London?

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Whatever is on your bucket list for 2016, Michael Ventre has you beat. The London IT engineer plans to swim the 3,800 miles from New York City to London -- and he wants you to help pay for it.

Ventre, 38, has conquered extreme swims like the English Channel and the Molokai channel in Hawaii and the swim from L.A.’s mainland to Catalina Island. He also has mastered ice swimming and participated in winter championship swims in Latvia and Finland.

He’s on a Really Big Quest for his Really Big Swim: He wants to raise almost $7.5 million for the British charity Oxfam in a bid to end extreme poverty by 2030.

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His plan for the swim is to start in New York’s Hudson River and end in the Thames in London. It will take him five to eight months to cross the Atlantic Ocean (something that takes the average flier about six hours), stopping each night to rest and restarting each day from the exact GPS point where he ended.

Ventre will need a massive crew with support boats, medical staff, etc. -- and that’s where you come in. Ventre has set up a crowd-funding Web page to explain his quest and raise the first roughly $60,000 (he’s 20% of the way there) so he can leverage that to lure corporate sponsors.

If all this comes together, the swim is scheduled for April 2017.

But that’s a really big if. Still it would be nice to see whether Ventre could pull this off -- the swim and his bid to end to world hunger. Stay tuned.

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Info: Michael Ventre’s New York to London Swim

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