Girl, 10, doubles fundraising goal after sea swim

A 10-year-old girl who has swum in the sea every day for a year has smashed her charity fundraising goal.

Clara, from Southwold in Suffolk, has raised more than £12,000 for the RNLI - doubling her original target, having heard about similar year-long challenges.

"Last year, I came and sat on the prom, very silent, and I walked up to my parents and said 'I've decided to swim in the sea every day for a year'.

"They hesitated for a bit and questioned 'is this real or is this fake?', and then they accepted it, but it took a bit of planning to completely figure it out."

Clara's dad, Nathan, is a volunteer for the local RNLI, and joined her each morning on the beach before school so that she could take her dip.

She completed her challenge last weekend, but Nathan said he had not expected her to stick with it in winter.

"In the middle of January she was jumping in, getting wet and then she was straight out. She turned some pretty violent shades of pink a couple of times," he said.

"We had to take her blood pressure, and it was alright, but she was tingly and a bit faint just from going in for 10, 15, 20 seconds."

The money Clara has raised will go to the Southwold lifeboat station.

Simon Hazelgrove, lifeboat operations manager, said: "I'm absolutely astonished. Myself, along with her father and many other people, thought she would never go through the winter.

"The fact that when there was snow on the ground she was rolling around in the waves... I mean I wouldn't do it. Pretty brutal."

Clara said she would carry on swimming, and already had her sights set on her next fundraiser.

"In a school talk they mentioned raising money for Year 6 residential and I thought, 'I have a bit of a habit of raising money', so I might do a challenge for that."

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