VOL. 9 ISSUE 101 • SUNDAY - MONDAY, JULY 17 - 18, 2016
P 15.00 • 20 PAGES
www.edgedavao.net
EDGEDAVAO Serving a seamless society
Inside Edge News P2
Alleged drug lord Lim yields to Rody
Indulge A1
ICEA Performing Arts restages Les Miserables
Conquering the
English Channel
Economy P10
DOT to launch ‘Duterte Tour’
Photo courtesy of Atty. Ingemar P. Macarine
Davao’s confab to gather foreign, local coco industry stakeholders Sports P15
ELLA FALLS SHORT
Internet, service interruption hit Davao, nearby provinces By ALEXANDER D. LOPEZ
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adlopez0920@gmail.com
NTERRUPTION of internet and data services of the Philippine Long Distance Telephone (PLDT) and Smart hit major towns and cities in Davao and SOCCSKSARGEN areas on Friday afternoon when their underground optic fiber was damaged by an on-going road repair in the area. At around 03:20 in the afternoon on Friday, July 15, the PLDT Smart sent
via SMS its first advisory and received by EDGE Davao that stated: “PLDT Smart Network Advisory 1: Voice call and SMS services of PLDT and Smart in the cities of Davao, Tagum, General Santos and Koronadal and surrounding areas have been degraded due to two breaks in our fiber optic transmission network in Mindanao region. Data services have been interrupted.”
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By HENRYLITO D. TACIO
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OR THE FIRST TIME IN HISTORY, a Filipino from Mindanao will try to swim across the treacherous English Channel in Great Britain.
“Less than two thousand swimmers from around the world have conquered it. But no Pinoy has ever done it yet,” Atty. Ingemar P. Macarine, touted at Pinoy Aquaman, told EDGE Davao in an exclusive interview. The lawyer-triathlete is scheduled to swim alone on August 9. As per official open water rules, the swimmer who will attempt the challenge has to wear nothing more than ordinary swimming trunks, swim cap, and goggles.
“The number one challenge that I will face is the cold water,” he pointed out. “I know I can swim 33 kilometers right now with a temperature of 29 degrees Celsius. But swimming that distance with a water temperature of 15 degrees Celsius is gonna be a great challenge.” As of this writing, Macarine and his team are already at the seaside city of Folkestone, in the southern tip of the United Kingdom. He is accompanied by Trent Gremsey, who does his training plan and stroke analysis. Filipino swimming coaches who assist him on a regular basis for the English Channel swim training are Vincent Indig and Gabby Renzales.
“When I swam 16.8 kilometers non-stop for 5 hours and 49 minutes from Bohol to Cebu last June 12, the water temperature then was 29 degrees Celsius,” Macarine said, adding that he is not used to swimming in the cold water. “That’s the reason why I purposely gained extra 10 kilograms of weight for insulation,” he said. According to Macarine, the English Channel is “the Mount Everest of open water swimming.” Actually, it is the body of water that separates southern England from northern France, and joins the southern part of the North Sea to the rest of the Atlantic Ocean. It is about 560 kilometers long and varies in width from
240 kilometers at its widest to 32.3 kilometers in the Strait of Dover. According to “Wikipedia,” the sport of Channel swimming traces its origins to the latter part of the 19th century when Captain Matthew Webb made the first observed and unassisted swim across the Strait of Dover, swimming from England to France on August 24–25, 1875 in 21 hours and 45 minutes. The fastest verified swim of the Channel was by Macarine’s trainer Grimsey, an Australian, on September 8, 2012 in 6 hours and 55 minutes, beating the previous record set in 2007 by Bulgarian swimmer Petar Stoychev.
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