A former British policeman has set off for West Africa ahead of his challenge to become the first person to swim across the Atlantic Ocean.
Ben Hooper, 36, from Cheltenham, UK, will swim about 2,000 miles (3,218 km) from Senegal to Brazil within 140 days.
He said for him it is “still a small swim for charity” and hoped it “would inspire others”.
Mr Hooper will continue training in Africa before starting the challenge on 1 November from a beach in Dakar.
He said the swim is a “straight line” distance of 1,632 nautical miles but he will need to take a near 3,000 nautical mile route “to account for drift whilst asleep on the boat at night and not harm the straight line distance needing to be swum for the world-first”.
Mr Hooper will have two support boats, with crew, and will have to eat 12,000 calories a day.
He said: “If this was easy and so straightforward then it would have been done – and it hasn’t.
“More people have landed on the moon than have even attempted to swim the across the Atlantic so it’s worth doing and it’s worth doing well.”
He will swim up to 10 hours each day in two sessions to enable recovery and reduce injury risk.
He said: “We’re limited by daylight.
“We don’t want to start too early or finish too late because the shark risk, the jellyfish risk goes up towards sun-down and sun-up. And repeat that basically for nearly five months.”
Other people have attempted the challenge but were not ratified by Guinness World Records.