A teenage girl who has become one of the youngest people to swim the English Channel said “this is just the start” of her swimming journey, writes The Daily Mail.

Prisha Tapre, 16, from Watford in Hertfordshire swam 21 miles from Dover to Cap Gris Nez with a time of 11 hours and 48 minutes on September 4 while raising money for charity. Prisha, who swims with Watford Swimming Club, said: “It just feels unreal. I still haven’t got my head around the fact I’ve swam the English Channel but I feel really good”.

She said she had been training for the day for a quarter of her life as she took up swimming aged 12. Prisha has gone on to participate in numerous competitions before successfully taking on parts of the Channel as part of a relay team last year. The pupil said one of her main concerns with the swim was setting off late in the day, as she does not have much experience swimming in darkness: “Over the 1st 2 hours, it was choppy and it was dark, but I got over it that was probably the worst part of my swim. After that, it all settled down and it was perfect, I could not ask for anything better. And it was warm. It was 19 degrees, but it was really still”.

Prisha has been balancing studying for her GCSEs with extensive training for the swim, going on 6-hour swims each weekend as well as one 10 hour swim. She wanted to take on an ambitious challenge as well as encourage young girls from ethnic minorities to take on sports like swimming: “I think I wanted to prove to myself that I could do something big. I wanted to do something different, and I just wanted to challenge myself. I’ve noticed that there aren’t a lot of ethnic minorities, like Asian girls, in competitive sports like swimming, and I just really wanted to influence other younger girls to go against the stereotypes. I feel like by doing this and by letting people know what I’m doing, it could hopefully let other girls also try to take on things like this”.