I’m really excited. The conditions are great. Um, I’m tiny bit nervous, but I’m really looking forward to it. Lily is preparing for the swim of a lifetime. Two km in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Portugal. That’s like swimming 80 lengths of your local swimming pool without stopping. And it’s all because she loves octopuses. They’re my favourite animal. Octopuses have some super cool abilities. For example, they can camouflage themselves and they have 9 brains and three hearts. I was researching about the octopus because we had to do this task in school, and when I was researching, it told me about the farm in the Canary Islands. Each year, more and more octopuses are being caught for people to eat. They’re currently fished in the wild using pots, lines and traps. But there are plans to open the world’s first octopus farm in one of Spain’s Canary Islands, wearing around 1 million octopuses every year. Octopuses like hanging out alone, being stuck in a tank with other octopuses might make them aggressive poorly, and can even result in them eating each other. So I don’t think factory farming them is right. If plans are approved, farmed octopus could hit the market within the next couple of years. Lily doesn’t want that. She hopes that her swim will raise awareness and money to help campaign against the farming of octopuses worldwide. I trained around three months. The training was hard work because in the ocean, it’s not As controlled as the pool, and sometimes you can’t see the floor, and there’s waves and currents and tides, and there’s a lot of things to think about. After so much preparation, it’s the day of Lily’s big swim. It was so much fun and the conditions were great. I kind of wanted to keep a pace that kept going, because if I stopped, I would have get cold. When you stop, it’s hard to go again. 2 km. Check. I’m so thankful for all the support. Lily’s Marathon swim raised over £9,000 for the animal charity compassion in World Farming, which is campaigning against the proposed octopus farm. I’m feeling a bit tired, but it went really well. I just pushed and I did it for all the little octopuses. The farm company concerned, Nueva Pesquera say that as wild octopus numbers are falling sharply, their plans will increase future octopus populations and that best practices will be adopted in their farming. The project has now been delayed by the Canary Islands government to allow for more studies into the impact on octopuses and the environment. I just hope we can stop octopus farming around the world before it even starts.