Sarah Tuff offers a quick overview of a SwimTrek Adventure Swimming Holiday.

There is a growing band of adventurers who have decided there’s a lot more to swimming than chlorine and crowded lanes. They travel to lakes, rivers, old gravel pits and wide open seas for a bigger challenge. They are rewarded with dramatic weather, amazing scenery, fishy company, starry night skies and sometimes extremely cold water.

Hannah Booth had never been one for group trips, but then the chance to swim between the Greek islands was too tempting. It might even be a life changer.

Here's a new way of seeing the Adriatic: Swim It! by Shelley Seid

The perfect moment doesn't come by that often, I thought as I watched a flotilla of yachts change course to allow me to continue my 3km swim between two Croatian Islands in the Adriatic. The sun was shining, the landscape was charming, the water was calm and the safety boat was in range.

Inspired by a legend, a poet and a close shave, Whit Mason swims from Europe to Asia.

Once upon a time, when men walked or rowed to war and closed with their enemies at the length of their spear, a youth named Leander lived on the Asian shore of the Hellespont, the strait we know today as the Dardanelles, next to the Gallipoli peninsula

Swimming the historic Hellespont is a romantic idea but there's little poetry in motion

The annual Hellespont swim in Turkey has been running for eight years and organiser Simon Murie, an Australian-born Briton who runs a company called SwimTrek, says conditions this week were easily the worst: 30-knot winds and choppy, swirling waters.

So how did I, an overweight 54-year-old journalist from Brisbane with no identifiable swimming prowess, find myself in the middle of the sea between Europe and Asia, gasping for air before being hit by the next wave and breast-stroking because freestyle involved taking in large amounts of water? Simply, this was a great adventure...

Will Hide tries to emulate Lord Byron's aquatic adventures in the Dardenelles

Despite living two centuries apart, I feel that I share a lot with Lord Byron — 18th-century poet, lover, dandy, bon viveur, icon.

The 6th Baron Byron, born in London in 1788, wrote poetry, and I won a prize in a short- story competition at school in 1982. He was described by Lady Caroline Lamb as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”; I have been described as “bloody annoying” on more than one occasion.

I discovered SwimTrek, a holiday company that takes you on open-water swimming trips around the world, about a year ago. Dreadfully unfit since having children, and with a bad case of middle-aged malaise, I decided things had to change. While other friends tackled marathons, I headed for the pool, and started training in January for my first week-long holiday alone – no kids, lots of sunshine and, most importantly, the sea.

The hosts, Maria and Petri, open their summer holiday home by Lake Sakara to the swimming holiday company Swimtrek, whose professional guides lead the way across several beautiful lakes and rivers of southern Finland. You swim approximately 5km a day (usually in two sessions) but you don’t have to be an Olympic swimmer; so long as you can swim at a steady pace for this distance you will be fine.

If you were inspired by Robson Greens effort after he swam in Snowdonia's Llynn LLydaw, why not create your own Holy Island challenge with a swim from Europe to Asia in the Lord Byron Bicentennial Hellespont Swim in May 2010.