As she outlines the exploits she had for her new book, Louise Minchin admits she was ‘panicking’ during one of her harrowing tasks.
Fearless: Adventures with Extraordinary Women follows the former BBC broadcaster as she takes on a variety of challenges while celebrating women’s stories of being “courageous,” “brave,” and “daring.”
Louise, 54, recounted some of the situations that caused readers ‘nightmares’ when explaining some of the chores she conducted on ITV’s Lorraine.
‘Fear is a good thing, but fear prevents you from doing things that are genuinely risky,’ she told Lorraine Kelly, adding, ‘We all need heroes that look like us.’
Louise once swam to Alcatraz, a tiny island off the coast of San Francisco known for its infamous jail.
Despite the’sharks and currants,’ Louise described the trip as ‘wonderful.’
She said: ‘You have to time it right, because the currants are so fast that if you went, if the currant is going fast then you’ve got no chance, so you go when you’ve got a 45-minute window and if you’re fast you can get through that window, but if you’re not, you won’t.’
Louise, on the other hand, recalls her dreadful ‘fear’ when she first tried freediving under ice in the dark.
‘This is freediving under ice in Finland, and you’re right, there’s so much wrong about that.
‘I know that some people have read the book and are having nightmares, so maybe it should come with a warning.
‘It was utterly amazing.’
Louise went on to describe how terrible it was, stating, ‘In my naivety, I believed [the ice] would be thin enough for me to smash my way out of it, but no, no, no.
‘It’s about this thick, and you have to pull yourself under, and the first time we did it, just to take it up a notch, was in the dark!’
The I’m A Celebrity star continued: ‘So you pull yourself under, you get pushed up against the surface, you can hardly swim.
‘The first moments I was in a panic, then I had seconds of “This is wonderful” then went straight back into panic mode.’
Lorraine airs weekdays from 9am on ITV1.
