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  Welcome to the Dips and Chips Blog.  We're Emma O'Brien and Penny Wilkin.  We're passionate wild swimmers! And we love everything to do with swimming.  We live in land locked Coventry, a city with not very much water. So we love to escape the concrete to explore the countryside and find some water to swim in.  We're passionate about swimming and want to share our passion with other people so that more people can share the joy, fun and benefits of wild swimming.   We're researching swim spots local to where we live and writing "Dips and Chips: An Illustrated guide to Wild Swimming in Central England.  Emma is an illustrator, artist and maker of monsters  She gets wet whenever she can and draws all of her swims.  https://emmajaneobrien.com Penny works full time on her swim coaching and triathlon coaching business.  http://www.youcancoaching.co.uk/ If you have any favourite places to dip you'd like to share then do let us know and yo...

Flies, Stingers, 10 strokes and Chips

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River Tam e at Kingsbury Church: August 26th 2020 On an autumnal feeling evening at the end of August we took a trip to investigate a different entry point to the river Tame at Kingsbury.  We'd been waiting to find out if the weather was good enough for our 6 person team to swim the channel. We'd just started packing when we found out we weren't swimming. So instead of feeling deflated we went for a swim!  There's been a fair bit of rain over the last few weeks so we were interested to see how that affected the river levels and the flow.  We parked in  the village on the main road and walked past the church toward the river and Kingsbury Water Park.  Straight away there were a lot of flies! But it was a lovely little walk down the steps at the side of the church to arrive at the footbridge and be greeted with wide green fields and the river.  There was an entry point consisting of a narrow slot down the bank to a tiny gravelly patch of beach just big enough...