The Human Swan: Sacha Dench’s Impossible 7,000km Flight

What does it take to face your deepest fear, strap a propeller to your back, and follow swans 7,000 kilometres from the Russian Arctic all the way to the wetlands of Britain?

In this inspiring episode of Why’d You Think You Could Do That?, host Sam Penny sits down with Sacha Dench — biologist, conservationist, adventurer, and the woman known worldwide as the “Human Swan.”

Sacha once admitted she was terrified of flying. Yet instead of letting that fear define her, she leaned into it, learned to fly, and turned it into the backbone of one of the most extraordinary conservation projects of our time: Flight of the Swans. Along the way, she became the first woman to cross the English Channel by paramotor and showed the world that bravery isn’t about fearlessness — it’s about choosing to fly anyway.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

• Overcoming fear: How Sacha turned a near-death flight in Panama into the catalyst for mastering aviation.
• Flight of the Swans: The inside story of her 7,000 km journey alongside Bewick’s swans, facing storms, freezing equipment, and solitude.
• Resilience and ingenuity: From knee injuries in remote Russia to makeshift paramotors tied together with string, hear how setbacks became solutions.
• Conservation without borders: The powerful impact of her expedition — from hunters in the Arctic to power companies in Estonia — and how it helped reverse a 25-year decline in swan numbers.
• Everyday bravery: Lessons you can apply in your own life about breaking down the impossible into achievable steps.

Why This Episode Matters

Sacha’s story isn’t just about records or paramotors. It’s about ordinary people doing extraordinary things when they say yes to a cause bigger than themselves.

If you’ve ever wondered how to:

• Push through fear,
• Turn a wild dream into reality, or
• Make a meaningful impact on the world around you,

this episode will leave you with practical insights and unforgettable inspiration.

Key Quotes

• “This is not just a story about birds. It’s about what happens when an ordinary person says yes to the impossible and discovers she can fly.” – Sam Penny
• “Most people have dreams they put on the back burner. Dare to map yours out, step by step. That’s how impossible things become possible.” – Sacha Dench

About Sacha Dench

• Nickname: The Human Swan
• First woman to fly across the English Channel by paramotor
• Founder of Conservation Without Borders
• Former freediving record holder and passionate biologist, dedicated to protecting migratory birds and ecosystems.

Follow Sacha’s work at Conservation Without Borders
and on her social channels. Instagram LinkedIn

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Creators and Guests

Host

Sam Penny

Sam Penny is an adventurer, entrepreneur, and keynote speaker who lives by the mantra “Say YES! to the Impossible.” From swimming the English Channel in winter to building and selling multi-million-dollar companies, Sam thrives on pushing boundaries in both business and life. As host of Why’d You Think You Could Do That?, he sits down with ordinary people who have done extraordinary things, uncovering the mindset, resilience, and bold decisions that made it possible — and showing listeners why their own impossible is closer than they think.

Guest

Sacha Dench

Biologist, Conservationist & Adventurer

What is Why'd You Think You Could Do That??

They’ve swum oceans, scaled mountains, launched empires, and shattered expectations. But before they did any of it, someone, maybe even themselves, thought: “You can’t do that.”

Hosted by Sam Penny, Why’d You Think You Could Do That? dives into the minds of people who said “screw it” and went for it anyway. From adventurers and elite athletes to wildcard entrepreneurs and creative renegades, each episode unpacks the one question they all have in common:

“Why'd you think you could do that?”

If you’re wired for more, haunted by big ideas, or just sick of playing it safe, this is your show.

Sam Penny (00:00)
Most people see birds fly overhead and barely notice. Fewer still ask, where are going? Or what would it take to follow them? And almost no one, absolutely no one decides to strap a propeller to their back and chase swans 7,000 kilometres from the Russian Arctic all the way to the wetlands of Britain. But today's guest did exactly that. She's a biologist who once admitted she was afraid of flying. But instead of letting that fear define her,

She leaned into it, she learned to fly, and then she used that flight to tell the story of one of the most urgent stories of our time, the story of migratory birds on the brink and the people fighting to save them. In the process, she became the first woman to cross the English Channel by paramotor, earned the nickname the human swan, and went on to push the limits of electric flight in an attempt to circle Britain.

Along the way, she faced storms that grounded her equipment that froze midair and stretches of exhausting solitude where the only company was the beat of wings above her. But she kept going because the mission was bigger than the fear. This is not just a story about birds or records or expeditions. It's about what happens when an ordinary person says yes to the impossible and discovers she can fly.

This is why do you think you could do that? And this is Sasha Dench. Sasha, welcome to the show.

Sacha Dench (01:24)
Thank very much for having me.

Sam Penny (01:26)
from the outside, Sasha, I'd have to say everyone would think you were destined to become an adventurer. But I think that really the past started in a lot more ordinary places than that.

Sasha, take me back to your childhood, growing up in Australia and then also Suffolk. What kind of kid were you?

Sacha Dench (01:45)
Ooh, what kind of kid was I? So I was very curious. I was an only child until my parents had a divorce and started remarrying I was seven, eight and nine. ⁓ And I was given a lot of freedom. had both of my parents really liked being in the surf. So they could both also hold their breath for a long time, which is, I guess might have some meaning a bit later on.

My dad's idea of babysitting me though was, for example, he used to like to spearfish off the North shore of Sydney. And he would sometimes go spearfishing off the rocks, but leave me in the rock pool. So I'd follow him, follow along exploring the rock pools while he was off spearfishing. And sometimes he'd bring something up for me to have a look at.

And then, yeah, my mum actually eventually moved down to Eden, the very southeast corner where she was ⁓ with a Dutchman. They'd bought a small property or 40 acre property and a one wooden room building on it. And it was slowly built over time, but it was Australian bush and we had very little in terms of

Mod cons and luxuries, no power, canned toilet, but all the freedom in the world. And so I had a lot of time to explore. My nearest mate was a couple of hours walk away. So I did spend quite a lot of time outside, but generally very curious and always a little bit of a tomboy, let's say that. Although I realized the other day people don't use that term anymore. So, but you get the idea.

Sam Penny (03:18)
⁓ I thought the tomboy term was still around. Did adventure run through your veins early then?

Sacha Dench (03:24)
Do you I'm not sure that I would have said adventure early on. So I used to like outdoor activities. I used to like swimming. I used to like swimming in the sea. When dad was surfing, I would like to be kind of swimming and put a mask on and be underwater. But I was never really good at anything. couldn't do anything. I wasn't fast at anything. I didn't have fantastic ball skills. So not the hand-eye coordination you'd need. I liked being outdoors, but I would never have been picked first in the like school sports teams.

But I was very confident outdoors. I'd be confident to build myself a camp, for example, or to go and walk to a mate's house through bush tracks I hadn't been to before, kind of more or less navigating where I was going to. outdoorsy, but I wasn't gifted, let's say that.

Sam Penny (04:05)
But certainly a lot of freedom to roam.

Sacha Dench (04:07)
Yeah, which I think definitely more Australian kids have or had at the time than you British kids now. They just could not believe the kind of upbringing and freedom and the trust I think parents would have in leaving you out and kind of, know, in reasonably big swells in the surf or out in the bush. yeah, that's given a lot of freedom.

Sam Penny (04:31)
So admitted ⁓ that you have a fear of flying. How did that fear shape you?

Sacha Dench (04:38)
So the fear, where did it come from? So it wasn't with me at all as a kid. I used to have to fly between my parents' houses when they moved quite a long way apart. My dad in Port Macquarie, mum down in Eden. when I was in my 20s, it was actually after uni, I was working with an anthropologist and we ended up in Panama in a small plane, four planes took off and three turned back because there was a big storm coming and our pilot decided he could make it to this little runway.

on one of 3000 little islands in the San Blas Islands. We ended up, say four of us in the back, two in the front, one of them was a passenger, we didn't have a co-pilot. And we ended up getting sucked into this storm, thrown around all over the place. And with the clouds so low, he kept kind of diving out of the clouds, trying to find this one little runway, which was long enough. All the islands are so small, this one runway was built out into the water on either side. So you really didn't have other options.

it was the most terrifying 40 minutes of my life. There was one point where I just said, can't we just go back? he just, the only thing he said throughout all of that was I don't have enough fuel. So this was our only option. When he did eventually find the landing site, he lay flat on the ground and ⁓ that, I think it was the powerlessness, like the pilot lay flat on the ground. Yep. Like that with his hands. Yeah. And ⁓ he had been terrified. You he was a dark skinned local and he looked pale.

Sam Penny (05:51)
Pilot did.

Sacha Dench (06:01)
while we were in the air. that left me, I guess the rational part of my brain is quite strong. So I would always kind of analyze the risk of getting in a plane and get on, but taking off, for example, just at Luton, a little bit of turbulence on takeoff. And I found myself like talking nonsense to the lady next to me and gripping her arms so tight, I gave her fingernail marks in her arm. So the irrational, fear of turbulence.

was really starting to get ⁓ ridiculous. The rational part of my brain, as I said, would always let me get onto a plane. But at this point, I just thought, yeah, I had to do something about that. And I realized the reason that this irrational fear was only growing, it was getting worse and worse, was that I didn't have enough information as I didn't throughout that whole 40 minutes flight. didn't know how bad was that. I didn't know how strong the plane was. Lots of the South American planes are ex-Russian.

date aircraft from the kind of communist era. And so I just had no idea what was going wrong and I didn't know how to fix it. So there was 40 minutes of complete powerlessness and no knowledge that I could do anything about it. And so I realized that if I wanted to get over this fear, what I needed to do was I just needed more information so that the rational part of my brain could talk the irrational one out of the talk.

Sam Penny (07:24)
Sacha, that was such an amazing story. ⁓ I completely understand the fear that you would have of flying and I would completely understand why you would never fly again. That must have just been so terrifying. But why did you feel that you had to conquer that fear?

Sacha Dench (07:45)
Because every part of my work was, I needed to fly as a biologist and as a biologist working with anthropologists, I was going to need to fly. I just had to get over it and I could just feel it getting worse and worse.

Sam Penny (08:01)
Wow. Now, let's talk about your work. You became a biologist. You mentioned earlier when your father would go spearfishing off the northern beaches of Sydney and you'd walk along the rock pools and looking at all the fish and crabs and everything like that in all the rock pools. Was that part of your fascination that led you into biology?

Sacha Dench (08:23)
Yeah, curiosity, definitely both there and then that mom's down at Eden, you know, we could, there was so much wildlife around that we had wombats that on the, on the kind of fields every night, liarbirds running around the house, a wedge-tailed eagle took my little sister's guinea pigs. Like it's, it's all of that, like, I guess an awe and wonder of nature for me. I grew up with it being

a huge source of inspiration. We were only ever allowed, I think, half an hour of television a day, and the television options are pretty small. I think we had Maxwell Smart and something else at the time. think the... Yeah, that's it. And the natural world just had so much more potential for everything. The other thing that I think is that certainly growing up in down inland from Eden,

Sam Penny (09:00)
Peter Russell Clark, come and get it.

Sacha Dench (09:19)
the where like we didn't really that kind of outdoors in the end was a very blurry line. We didn't really lock the doors ever. I was so closely connected to this idea that actually all of our lives are dependent on nature and are interconnected with it. So our wood came from there. Lots of our food came from there. Our water depended on kind of rainfall and river and everything. So it also felt like, I mean, studying biology and studying nature is just like studying life, how the planet works.

how our lives work. I don't think I ever sort of saw it as like studying animals, studying a separate thing to us. It was just like, this is how stuff works. And I had an endless curiosity for that.

Sam Penny (10:01)
sounds like you're starting to build this beautiful cross section intersection of adventure and biology. Was there a moment, a first step where you remember you deliberately stepped outside your comfort zone?

Sacha Dench (10:15)
So getting over my fear of flying was a really big one. So for that, I knew that I needed to understand air. I could look out the window in a plane that was going through turbulence and I could not see why. Why was the plane shaking? And I figured I needed to read the air. And the best way to do that was to learn to fly an aircraft myself at first, but I started in a...

in like a sail plane that gets towed up a small aircraft, that small glider. And I tried with that, but there was too many complications with that. First of all, you know, there's a lot of engineering in a plane like that that I couldn't test in myself. So yeah, I did a few flights and would kept telling the instructor like, I'm only hearing the three words in any instruction. I'm that terrified.

And everything about it was awful being total on the ground at speed. then like the G forces as you're suddenly towed up at an angle, and then the pop as the line releases you and then you're straight hunting for turbulence. They're all thermal zones, essence turbulence. And in all of that, I was terrified 100 % of the way gripping the side of the plane often. And the instructor kept saying to me, look, you ride a motorcycle, how can you find this so scary? And I was just like, it is, there's so many things that are out of my control.

And then when we were packing the aircraft away at one point, I said, how did the wings come off? Because it was going into a small box and he said, oh, you pull this pin on the bottom and then that will release the wings. And at that point I realized I'm not a good enough engineer to know whether that pin is secure. And so this is too much for me. I needed to go to aircraft that was much simpler. And then I looked at paragliding and I was like, okay, with paragliding, can look at every, I can see every cell in the wing. I can test every line.

and I can understand how it works. It's a pendulum and the wing works as a normal wing would work to create lift. I can get my head around that and I can be in control of it. And so I started flying in this most flimsy aircraft that everyone who knew I was scared of flying was thinking, what are you doing? But I did it in really tiny steps. At first it was like little hops off a hill and then it was slightly longer.

And it wasn't probably for a year that I actually first went, let me get, can feel some lift here. Let me actually explore it and see if I can get to altitude. And yeah, that opened the whole new world where it was more something that I was in control of rather than that I was just struggling to keep control of myself while I was in it.

Sam Penny (12:31)
Well.

So for those listening, a paramotor essentially is a parachute with a big fan on your back, isn't it?

Sacha Dench (12:43)
Yeah, well at this stage I was only putting the paraglider on, so I hadn't quite got as far as the motor yet, but yeah.

Sam Penny (12:49)
Wow. Now, Sasha, every journey, it always begins with a spark, a real itch that you just can't ignore. What was the moment that made you say, I need to follow the swans?

Sacha Dench (13:02)
so from flying the paraglider and then those early flights, getting the thermals and getting to altitude, I looked out across the landscape and was like, wow, you get a very interesting and different vantage point. I was near the area where I was working on wetlands. And then one day I saw someone put a motor on their back and just fly. And with a motor on your back, you can fly at dawn and dusk when the winds are very light and the light is really beautiful.

And so that is where I started flying paramotors, partly inspired by the fact that I could take really useful and beautiful aerial photographs. And you could travel much further than you could with any kind of small drone. So yeah, it was from that, I started to use the paramotor for work. And then that was kind of going on in the background.

alongside that, I had started working for the Wildfowl and Wetland Trust in the UK who work on migratory birds. And I hadn't really been particularly interested in birds. My background was all sort of turtles and sharks. but I had got a reputation for being able to look at the same problem everyone else is looking at and come up with some completely different angles on how you could solve it.

And so a group of scientists working on this bird, the Bewick Swan, who had been declining for the past 25 years, we were losing about one in four on every migration. it was people from every country, from Russia to the UK, and there were lots of different threats they were dealing with on the route. So it was all quite a complicated problem. I was just asked to come and help them solve that.

And as they started speaking, I realized that I had actually no idea of just the scale of the migrations these birds do. And I also realized that the way that the scientists were talking about all the problems was so boring and so miserable that there was no way they were going to get the attention of all the different industries they needed if they just kept telling that story with data sheets. It wasn't going to work. And I just started to imagine this incredible journey the birds go through, like this

White Swan, most people think spends all the time kind of living in British lakes. you look at the scale of that journey from the Russian Arctic land of the reindeer breeders and polar bears, they're crossing some of the wildest, like most uninhabited wetlands, and then some of the densest forest all the way across Europe, know, 11 to 13 countries. There is an amazing story there. And now we know with all the threats they're being shot at, they're chasing an icy Arctic winter ⁓ all of the time.

I think there's a kind James Bond story for the bird world. And I need to somehow find a way of telling that at first. And in Australia and in Europe, I've grown up in hunting communities. And with hunting being one of the threats in a few different ways, I was pretty sure with a story like that, I could get the attention of hunters and get them to help as well. But what I didn't know is how to tell it. And then I was looking at putting little cameras on birds initially and thinking they were pretty big at the time.

And then I thought about, you know, stationing people along the way. And yeah, it was one day out flying my paramotor with a new wing, realizing the speed I was doing was the same speed as a bird called Hope was doing across the English channel. And then these two ideas collided and I was like, could I just, could I fly the whole journey with the birds? I fly at same speed and altitude. You have many of the same challenges. You're always looking for safe places to roost and rest.

You're always on the lookout for aerial obstructions like power lines and wind and weather conditions. Could I fly with the birds and get a really good aerial picture of the habitats they fly over? And even more important than that, with a paramotor, you can take off and land pretty much anywhere. You don't need a hill either. So could I stop and land and speak to people all the way and make enough friends that would help us

to save the swans en route and figure out what we were missing. So all these, this idea came together as a fantastical story, dream, imagination. And I tried to bottle it. There was no way I was going to tell anybody this completely bonkers idea. And I sat on it for months.

Sam Penny (17:11)
So at

the start, Sasha, did you imagine how big it would become or was it just something, just an idea? I just need to try that.

Sacha Dench (17:20)
It was just an idea, but an idea that I knew, I thought nobody would back it. I thought nobody would back me doing it. I wasn't sure that it would happen. I had just let myself get a bit carried away with this, with this idea. so I sat on it for months and then it started keeping me up at night. So I'd wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it.

And then I realized it was happening because I honestly thought that it would work. I really, really thought that it would work. so anyway, just to get it out of my head, I wrote it up as a one pager and sent it off to one of the researchers. And the answer she sent me back within minutes was this idea is completely bonkers, but this is so bonkers it might just work. Let's have coffee. And so yeah, over coffee.

Sam Penny (18:04)
you

Sacha Dench (18:10)
We talked about it and with that, that started the ball rolling really.

Sam Penny (18:15)
I love Sasha how you said you kept it to yourself. You kept it quiet, but it just kept keeping you up. In 2019, I was the first person on the planet to attempt to swim the English channel in winter. And when I came up with the idea of trying it, I was exactly the same. It kept me up at night. It was all I could think about. I was looking at water data and trying to forecast what's the water temperature going to be in December in the English channel.

And I just could not stop thinking about it. I didn't tell anybody. I bottled it up. And then one day someone said, there's something up, isn't there? What's going on? Tell me. And then it just blurted out. And is that the same kind of moment when you first verbalized it to someone, it all of a sudden cemented itself in your mind?

Sacha Dench (19:05)
Yep, pretty much. Well, think that basically that was the first bit of letting the cat out of the bag because she then went and mentioned it to a few other people. And at that point, I was like, okay, this ⁓ is starting to roll. Am I going to stop it? Because you always have a moment to stop it. And I think then I had to just I kept testing myself but yeah, didn't stop it. And then

Sam Penny (19:27)
So what was your reaction

from your friends and family?

Sacha Dench (19:30)
I didn't tell friends and family at first. I went to people that I thought would tell me no, but with a, that knew something about it. I had a friend who's a paramotor pilot, but is also an RAF logistics. And he met up with me and said, yeah, yeah, I'd love to, I'd love to help him what your idea is. And when I told him what it was, his answer was, I'm sorry, I deal in the possible, not the impossible. I can't help you with this.

Sam Penny (19:33)
Ha

Sacha Dench (19:54)
And he looked at it and he was just like, it's ridiculous. It's a ridiculous distance. There's no way the Russians are going to let you do any of that flying. Like the logistics are so complicated and all the rest of it. But I mean, I was looking at it as lots of short flights. And I had the difference between a military view and mine was that I knew from travels around the world that actually people in most parts of the world are quite helpful. And if you have a dream that's big and inspiring enough and a cause that people

could be encouraged to care about, they will generally help. So I was relying partly on knowing people along the way would help. And as a military person, that's not how things work. And so the next person I went to was an explorer, a British explorer called Richard Meredith Hardy who can pretty much fly anything. He was the first person to fly a microlight down into Africa.

I sent him first, I think it's a text message because I was a little bit scared and his response was, call me, full stop. And so I did, and I was terrified thinking he would call me an idiot because I hadn't been flying paramotors very long at that point. he said was like, tell me in in detail what you think you will do, where, when, what are your issues.

He just listened to most of the time and then he ended up sending an email and cc-ing in four different pilots across Europe who he thought could help me with the most difficult, and in Russia, who could help me with the most difficult stretches. So there was never a point where he said no, he did ask difficult questions. And the next person I was put in touch with was actually Ranulph Fiennes he did the same.

called me for a meeting, grilled me over maps and things. And then he said, I really don't think this can be done, but I think if anyone can do it, then it's probably you, based on how enthusiastic I was about it. So he then also became our first sponsor. And then with his money and his support and patronage behind it.

suddenly that started to open up the doors of the organization and others. And at that point I was offering to take four months off work and completely pay for this myself, just to be clear. I was so sure that it would work. And I was like, maybe this is my legacy thing. I'm never going to be one for like a big wedding. I'm probably never going to be interested in a big fancy car. If I'm going to invest something in something, it might just be this. so yeah, that's I think how it went from a...

from an inkling and a mad idea to having enough support to go for it. And at that point, I still didn't think, I thought that I probably wouldn't do it, I probably wouldn't complete it exactly, but I had an idea that even the attempt would at least get people's attention enough that we could start talking about swans.

Sam Penny (22:42)
So dreaming about flying with swans is one thing. Strapping in and doing it is another. How do even prepare for something, a journey that was eventually going to be 7,000 kilometers?

Sacha Dench (22:55)
So getting advice from people was the first thing and then a recce trip So I figured out the most difficult thing in terms of logistics and permissions was going to be the Russian Arctic. So I was talking about flying in a small aircraft, might not show up on radar across five of Russia's border regions. And let's be clear, this is before their invasion of the Ukraine.

I had no idea, couldn't find a way to ask for those permissions. But I at least was going to give it a go. So I was given 3,000 pounds and a few weeks to go up to the Russian Arctic and try and find the right support to get fuel for this first thousand kilometers. There was no option for a support crew because there's no roads anywhere along there and it's wild Arctic. So yeah, I gathered a group of everyone I could think of from the

hunting and Arctic sort of, mostly Arctic tourism is hunting related up there. And the Nenets, the native community up there, the Nenets people also have some associations. So I gathered a meeting together with all of them and I showed them my plan. In fact, everyone that turned up was, they were all men. I had brought up my, brought up the big map.

and I'd show them what I was trying to do and I told them about the sort of swan story. And when they stopped laughing and asking, but who's the actual pilot, assuming it couldn't possibly be me and it must've been a man. And just to be clear, they obviously already thought that I was going to be a man because Sasha is usually a Russian, a man's name in Russia. Yeah, when they all stopped kind of laughing, I showed them this map and I'd ask them, can I get fuel stops fuel in these towns across the North?

Sam Penny (24:23)
Yes.

Sacha Dench (24:34)
And at that point, they'd said, one of them said, Oh, do you know what the word means in brackets at the end of those town names? And I didn't know. And it meant abandoned. So some of them had been abandoned like 15 years ago. there was one town, there was one man left just living there on his own. And so they had a good laugh at my expense then, but then all it took was one man, a guy who was obviously of the Nenets community from his eyes and his face. And he was a bush pilot up there.

And he brought up his own map with little pencil marks on it. And he said, you won't see this on a, in Russian this was, but you won't see this on the digital maps, but there's a Russian, there's a couple of hunting huts in these places and there's a Russian weather station that the Russian government mans with one person there. And he does the emergency and the fuel supplies to those places. So he was offering basically to leave fuel drops along there.

And he obviously was someone that everybody else looked up to because as soon as he put his hat in the ring and decided to help, everybody else suddenly had an amphibious vehicle or something else that was able to help. And suddenly the conversation became about how and not about whether or who the hell are you, who the hell are you to think you can come and fly here?

So there was that logistical question and then I was asking for permission. So I started straight away with asking the Russian embassy, with asking the Russian aviation authority, with sending a communication to what I thought might get to the FSB. ⁓ And we weren't getting any answers whatsoever. So I just thought I'd keep on cracking at that. And in the background, then up in the Arctic looked at all the risks that I could see from extreme weather, that it'd be cold flying.

depending on the altitude, so the higher you go up, the colder it gets, so I'd have to account for the cold. The whole of that Russian Arctic, the reason birds go there is because it's a massive wetland and pool, so could I survive a water landing in a paramotor? And the British Hang Gliding and Para Gliding Association website has a line that says water landings are unsurvivable even at the time, so I would have to prove that it was not unsurvivable if I was going to get support to go up there.

And so, yeah, I proceeded to go on trainings in Turkey for extreme turbulence where you collapse your wing and then try and recover it, starting at 7,000 feet. I collaborated with a university to do testing in a cold chamber with a big fan, so simulating flights across the Arctic in freezing temperatures, different ⁓ types of clothing from a flight suit for ⁓

for microlight pilots to multiple layers of other clothing. And eventually we realized the microlight suit was great, great if you're sitting in an aircraft and just moving your hands and your feet to steer, but you can't put a backpack on your back and run with it on. So that was dismissed straight away. And then I also, yeah, we created a of a mock-up of a, well, a paramotor, but with a replacement motor of the same weight and everything.

and tested landings into water in the RNLI pool where they could simulate rain and wind and waves because it's actually the wing that ends up being more dangerous to you, all the lines and the fabric sucks down onto the water. And in the background, just kept on at the permissions knowing that that was my real limiting factor.

went to Ranulph Fiennes and David Attenborough for ⁓ because I thought that people are going to at least least they would get a response if you've got their names behind you and then my Russian fixer said that's they're great but actually we've got our own explorers and so Ranulph Fiennes is a negative for us and all our films are dubbed so we don't know David Attenborough's voice ⁓ but what the Russians really love is James Bond.

Sam Penny (28:23)
haha

Sacha Dench (28:33)
And I noticed that your last name is Dench. Is there any chance that you are related to Dame Judi Dench? Because that might really help. ⁓ And of course, I was horrified that she might help you with an aviation permission. we eventually found that we were related. She became a patron and fair enough, within a few weeks, we had an answer on permissions.

Sam Penny (28:57)
That's unbelievable. There's so much organization that goes into this. It sounds like you're having win after win after win after win, but there's always low moments in training, in the preparations. Was there a point where you just thought to yourself, hang on, I don't think I can do this.

Sacha Dench (29:06)
⁓

God,

I was looking at all the risks and making sure that I was prepared as possible for everything. But looking at all the unknowns, there was so many unknowns that I thought the chance of actually doing it were. I was getting pretty convinced that I could start it, but to be able to do it, to work around the variable winds, to work around the movements of the birds. I thought that was all.

highly unlikely that the stars would align and things would magically work because we needed people in every country. Yeah, we needed the weather to play ball with us as well. We needed the swans to play ball. We needed all the equipment not to fail. There was a lot of things. However, there came a point where I could say to myself, even if I don't do this, this is already working. If my aim was to get people talking about swans,

From the day I did the jumping into a pool with a paramotor on my back and simulating stormy weather, that story was covered in the news even in Russia and from across Russia and to the UK around the story that there's this crazy lady that's about to try and fly with the birds from Russia to the UK. And I knew it was working because I received a letter from a Russian paratrooper who'd been

dropped out of an aircraft into the Russian tundra and had landed in the water there ⁓ several times. And two of the times he said he'd nearly died. And he'd written me this really long letter with diagrams and pictures of all the ways I would definitely die if I tried this. And so in fact, that letter was my moment of realizing that we are already getting people talking. Just the intention alone is motivating people to talk about this. So we're already winning. ⁓

Sam Penny (31:03)
But there's so many

moments, Sasha, where people are telling you that you could die. Was there a moment where fear nearly stopped you?

Sacha Dench (31:11)
not fear. So I definitely don't want to die, but I had, I knew some things other people didn't. So I have competed at freediving. I'm an experienced scuba diver and cave diver. So I'm quite comfortable with finding solutions and making sure I've got backups and backups of to look after myself in water.

So I knew that, so for example, the long English channel crossings, I've never heard of anyone else doing this in water, but I knew actually, even if I've got a six and a half minute breath hold, the big risk is actually you hit with some sort of impact. You hit a wave at a funny angle and actually you're winded and then you've got no air and then you've got no time to sort out any issues. But if you've got a small spare air strap to you, you buy enough minutes to be able to untangle yourself, to be able to cut open lines and things.

So I had thought through all that bit quite well and I was pretty confident that I would not die landing in water. There were multiple options. I came up with a different method of floats for the paramotor. The things I'd seen used actually three floats on different parts of your wing. If they self inflate, then you are essentially also pinned down because you really can't move. If you've got a tripod of floats around you, you can't flip that over. So I ended up with a couple of very flexible bags attached at one point that I could maneuver with my arms.

and flip myself over easily. So I was pretty sure that I would conquer that. I tell you what, I took every person saying, you can't do this. kind of, of course, every one of those felt like a bit of a punch in the guts and like, it was disappointing. But I took it all like they're my very valuable devil's advocates. And, you know, I cherish the people brave enough to say.

No, you can't do this because a lot of people just go, ⁓ yes, Sasha, you're amazing. This is a great idea. And then, you know, they haven't really thought about it. So I think the things that people said were difficult were things I knew that I probably did have. I had an advantage over other people. So maybe it was also convincing me that if I still wanted to do this, despite knowing those things that they said to be true and knowing the potential solutions I had, I thought were enough. Maybe I was partly also finding my calling. mean,

People would also look at this idea of flying over remote areas where you didn't know the people you were going to land with and God knows what they might be like. The fact that I was interested in that, I like meeting strangers and others would look at even the places we were going to and go, that sounds, that's terrifying, these uninhabited areas. And I was looking at them going, wow, they're some of the most stunning places on the planet. Imagine if I could be there just once in my life. I think I felt more than anything, was...

I was finding a project that was definitely a calling.

Sam Penny (33:56)
Wow, sounds absolutely amazing. Okay, now the day comes for what is now known as the flight of the swans. Take me to that first moment, take us back to Russia, the first day of flying with the swans, what was running through your mind?

Sacha Dench (34:12)
I got up to the Arctic and I still didn't have the official permission. Let's be clear about this. So it wasn't until the fixer said, my gosh, the governor is coming down to wish you well. And I was like, is this a good thing or a bad thing? And he said, well, he's directly appointed by Putin. So if he's coming down to wish you well, then that means that...

you have clearance. And that's when I got the text message, give you permission, but we won't stop you as long as you send a satellite phone message before every flight and wait for a thumbs up. So I had that. With that, the next day, I went straight out onto the tundra. So it's about, say, four or five hours boat ride out to this.

a massive delta up in the Arctic where the swans gather before migration. And I'd hoped to have a few days there to, because with all the other issues going on, I hadn't been able to do very much flying and had to demonstrate to the officials that I could fly a paramotor, but they wanted me to fly from a, like a building site and sort of empty building site in the middle of the town, which you would not normally do. And I hadn't had a huge amount of time for the last minute tweaks of kit.

And so we'd been up there 24 hours. I tested sleeping that night in the little para tent using my tent. And I'd hoped that we'd had another five or six days. And then the first GPS collar on the first of the 12 birds we had tags on pinged on migration. And with that, I was like, God, do I have to go now? Do I have to go now? And the researchers said if the birds have started to move, they know something that you don't because they're further, they're further north.

if the icy Arctic winter is coming, the landscape is going to change, it will freeze over quickly. So with that, yeah, I had to ⁓ put the paramotor on everything and, and take off. How did it feel? Like, very daunting. I think this is the first time it really felt real. There were, there was a couple of people with cameras came out to record it, which also wasn't great, particularly as

My Paraglider that had been sponsored had been given multicolored lines and one of them was purple. And we were taking off running on blueberries and the purple line had ended up wrapped around my foot. So actually my first takeoff was I ran and then face planted because my foot, no one's ever shared that footage, but it does exist. I face planted and it was very light winds as well. So I had a really long run to take off and the whole, all the little islands up there are not very long.

and you're running on sort of slightly spongy blueberry bushes. So yeah, the very first moment was a bit of a, oh gosh, I hope this is not an omen for the rest of the trip. But anyway, I sorted myself out, went in for the other run and I took off probably just a few meters before the end of the bit of land. and then from then on, I was pretty much, I had a job to do to focus on.

And so I didn't really have that much time then to start analyzing whether, why, if I just was there to get as much information ⁓ as possible. And that thankfully, the purpose drove what I was going to do each day and drove out spaces for sort of self doubt and all the rest of it.

Sam Penny (37:24)
How long was the journey?

Sacha Dench (37:26)
In total it took just over three months.

Sam Penny (37:28)
There were obviously some hard parts throughout the expedition. What was the hardest moment you faced? And even was it a perhaps a point where you almost gave up?

Sacha Dench (37:32)
Mm-hmm.

yeah, there were a few. day one or day two even, I had a motor failure. That was dreadful. ⁓ I could feel it spluttering in the air and thankfully that was just before a landing. ⁓ And it happened to be at that weather station. ⁓ The lone guy who was there did help to try and help fix it.

Yeah, there was there was no chance. It was actually the boat ride out to the out to our start point. The boat driver would not calm down and we had us we had basically a slight wave all the way. So the boat had been going boom, boom, boom, boom, boom and hitting hitting waves. And that had loosened a few essential bits of the motor. So in the end, Vlad, that pilot I mentioned, he had to fly out my one spare motor and and to make all of

bring all that together. I also had to get to a beach where he could land and there was no way I could have walked there across the tundra bog like that. And these reindeer herders turned up with a reindeer sled and basically strapped me on and they rode me like the reindeer sled is very long so it can kind of fly across potholes like divots and streams and everything else. And so they rode me about eight kilometres on the back of a with five reindeer on the back of the sled.

to get to Vlad who was waiting at a beach to get this spare paramotor. I mean, this whole having faith in people, stepping up to help when there's an idea that's pretty bonkers was starting to play out. there were a couple of times when I had a huge amount of weight on me to try and take off with. There were times when it was very difficult. The Russian pilot that was there, a guy called Alexander Bogdanov, he's very, very strong pilot.

And he would find it easier than I would. So there were moments when I just thought, maybe, am I allowed to think that maybe this is not a thing for a girl to do? Anyway, I always managed to find ⁓ some route to do it, shift position or slightly change the way I was taking off. ⁓ And then about halfway across Russia, I had a takeoff in a field where I snapped my ACL. And that was also...

That was horrendous. was literally twisting to take off 50 kilos on my back with all the survival gear and everything. And I just felt my knee give way and ended up in a screaming heap on the ground. I don't know if you've ever broken an ACL before. It's the thing, it's a standard football type injury. Yeah, within about five minutes I was thinking, maybe it's all right. Maybe I just sort of, maybe I just sort of, you know, temporarily did something. And then, I got up and tried again and then.

straight back over. And at that point, yeah, there was a, that was a, that was a real downer for, let's say a few days, you know, everything had been going quite well. And ⁓ I actually thought that the rest of the team would give up on me because why would you like there was other people who could, there were other pilots, maybe we could bring another pilot out. And then I was like, actually, it's, it's the observations from the air and the, the learning and

speaking to people, which is really important. And there's just physically no way to do that by land up there. So it had to be by motor. Could somebody else do that for us? We tried strapping my knee up. We had a medic that had joined us across from Arkangelsk. She tried strapping my knee up in different ways. And yeah, there's no amount of tightening she could do for that. But then, to my amazement,

The whole team kind of rallied and then went to pretty extremes along with the locals and built me a paramotor, a trike to strap on to basically attach to my paramotor so I could take off on wheels. And ⁓ yeah, with that, it was quite heavy because it wasn't made specifically for that. And the first few flights, my propeller was shredded.

And we looked at and was thinking, how is the propeller, the paramotor bit itself isn't different. And the engineer figured out that actually it was the bolts, that everything being rigid was the problem. So we took out all the bolts and tied it all together with my spare paraglider lines. So the whole thing was held together with string. And yeah, after many failed attempts, not particularly being strong enough for this, I managed to master that and not master, I managed to figure out how to fly with that. ⁓

and get going again. And we'd lost about a week by that time, but ⁓ we could still keep moving.

Sam Penny (42:19)
It's amazing, Sasha, there's so many adventures within the adventure. And that's one of the things that I absolutely love of all the guests that I've had and my own personal experiences going after something big, some great adventure. The big adventure that we think that we're chasing, in actual fact, the most amount of joy is the journey along the way. Is that how you found it?

Sacha Dench (42:42)
Absolutely. I stopped clinging to this idea of achieving a thing at the end. the, the end goal when I realized basically that just by trying, I was getting people talking about it. As soon as I focused on that and focused on

making sure that we just had the best conditions. So finding people who were people for the team who weren't necessarily the best at their particular job, but people who were really bought into the cause. Then I realized you had people who were problem solvers who would help you find solutions rather than go, well, this isn't working and kind of walk off. So it became a bit about learning that it became about

finding teams in each country. guess I learned a lot more than about paramotor. I became quite a good paramotorist by the end of it. Also realized that doing something like paramotoring for three months solidly can rewire your brain significantly so that when you get back, actually, your ordinary job is almost impossible to do. But you're an amazing pilot. So yeah, I think I totally agree with you. There were lots of...

lots of different adventures, experiences, learnings within it. Yeah, it became and also became more about all of those than it did about the actual can one woman fly this journey. It just became about, can we rally enough people to turn things around for the swans?

Sam Penny (44:03)
And you even set a record along the way being the first woman to fly across the English Channel by paramotor. How did that make you feel? Did you know that you were going to be the first person? The first woman?

Sacha Dench (44:15)
I don't think I did. I, in fact, it was Guinness World Record that contacted me and said, have you got a GPS record of the flight and then found me? And I think it was quite a long way later. To be honest, when the first journalist asked me that question as I landed, I was like, what? I've just flown from Russian Arctic. I've flown by that time almost 6,000 kilometres.

Sam Penny (44:39)
Ha

Sacha Dench (44:43)
all the way here and you're interested in this, you know, the what is it 30 something kilometres across the English Channel? I knew that a man had done it in the mid 80s at some point. So I was like, I'm pretty sure it's just about time that a woman did it if they haven't already. was a little bit surprised at how important that was to people. But in the end, I

Sam Penny (44:48)
34 kilometers.

Sacha Dench (45:07)
I just realized, you know, it is a big marker. It is a big scary body of water. if that's what gets people's attention, then let's great kind of, let's use that.

does a record really mean anything? But actually, it is a hook for so many more media stories about what we were trying to do. And it helped it reach a load more people. So for that, was invaluable.

Sam Penny (45:33)
I'll tell you exactly what I think it is. I've swum the English channel and I've also attempted to swim it in winter. So people amazed that, yeah, you swam the English channel because they can get their head around it. But trying to swim the English channel in winter, being the first person on the planet, you can see people just gloss over their eyes, just, I have no idea what you're talking about. I cannot relate to what you're talking about whatsoever. I don't know what 10 degree.

Sacha Dench (46:01)
or what?

Sam Penny (46:03)
Yeah, exactly. I don't know what 10 degree water feels like. I don't know what the English Channel would be like in December. I just don't get it. And so I tune out and it'd be the same as what you're talking about here. People would not understand what it takes to fly 7000 kilometers from the Russian Arctic all the way to the UK. But they understand that last little bit of flying across the English Channel. And like you say, that's the hook.

That's the part that people can connect with and then you can follow on with the rest of the story. That's my take on it anyway.

all of this, Sasha, really comes down to one choice. It's the moment you decided to say yes. And the flight of the swans. Why did you think you could do that?

Sacha Dench (46:50)
Why did I think that I could do that?

At first, it first started with if somebody could do that, it could be amazing because it would bring together so many different things. We'd get an immediate bird's eye view of why we were losing so many. We'd get a chance to stop and speak to people. And we knew that we were like the scientists couldn't get everywhere and there was something that we're missing on route. So it started with if somebody could do this, it would be amazing. And then I was thinking, you know, could it be me?

And then I realized that, you know, there's the, am, like I said, I'm not good at a lot of things that are normally sort of sporty, your hand-eye coordination, your ball sports, your speed, but I am good at problem solving and the big risk was water landings. And I have an, you know, an unusual ability in terms of breath holding and being confident underwater.

Sam Penny (47:50)
Okay, I want to just stop you there because this is one of the really interesting things in my research. You used to hold the British record, female record for freediving. What was the go there?

Sacha Dench (47:53)
Okay.

I once broke the record of, think when the breath hold record was six minutes and 10, I think I held my breath for six minutes and 22 seconds. within five weeks of my first free diving course in the UK, I was on the British team. I also knew from the moment that someone, I bumped into someone on Trafalgar square who had a load of photographs in their bag.

I actually knocked a photographer over and he'd just been on a free diving course. And I had always known I could hold my breath longer than everybody else playing Mermaids in the pool or out in the ocean. I could hold my breath long enough to scare my parents, which is not a fun game. I wouldn't recommend it to anybody. ⁓ So with that, thought, gosh, I mean, I'm pretty comfortable underwater. I can't believe that's an actual sport. ⁓ But yeah, that's, guess, how all of that started. And then once I was...

with a team of people who are all trained at it. And then you could use this breath hold ability to also get maximum distance and then dive on wrecks and do sharknet surveys all with breath hold rather than tanks. That all kind of opened up a whole new world. But yeah, that is one area that I have an unusual skill in. have large lungs and my extremities go cold very quickly as soon as I hold my breath underwater. I knew I had a...

an aptitude for something like this that would be a benefit on an adventure.

Sam Penny (49:21)
It sounds like the perfect Venn diagram. You've got this amazing ability to hold your breath in case you landed in the water with your paramotor. You trained yourself to be a great paramotor pilot. At the same time, you're a biologist with a keen interest in migratory birds. So was it a total belief?

Sacha Dench (49:42)
Can I also add that I have moved around a lot with parents that were separated. I think I went to 14 schools before I was 11 or 11 before I was 14, some of those in Switzerland as well. So I had had to adapt many times to unique environments. Kids can be pretty brutal as well. They can be bullies. So I'd become very adept at kind of reading a room and understanding a dynamic amongst people. And I was comfortable at learning the basics of new languages.

Sam Penny (50:06)
Wow. So did you have a total belief that you'd be able to achieve this or was it just enough of a spark that you could say, yep, I can start this.

Sacha Dench (50:17)
It was that, it was the, can start this and it was even by trying, we're going to get the right sort of ⁓ interest in media coverage about the swans that would, we were trying to crowdsource information from a lot of different people. ⁓ There were those things together and I had by that time been really convinced about not just the swans, but when you look at it, this swan migration route is one of the nine big flyways around the world that

think something like 40 % of all the migratory birds around the world are using this Russian Arctic ⁓ at a time. And along this flyway, there are millions of birds. And anything that's going wrong for the big white swan, which is very visible and quite well loved, will be going wrong for lots of other birds as well. So the cause was big enough that I just thought this is worth trying. And it's worth the potential embarrassment of people calling you a failure if you don't manage to do it.

So yeah, I think it was that. I had just been convinced by enough scientists who'd spent 25 years of their lives putting time into it. It was actually a compulsion to try and help them that made me do it. I just knew that this would bring something different that they needed, basically. They needed a way of making the data mean something and getting ordinary people contributing to the data. And I just felt like I had this pin that it was worth the potential failure.

Sam Penny (51:41)
If it did end in failure, would you have been concerned about what people would be saying?

Sacha Dench (51:47)
People can be brutal. not like I was well known. I don't think I would have had this sort tall poppy thing beforehand. I'd also worked at Australian Geographic four years before that. So worked with explorers and had seen that people can like lift you up and then they like to knock you down on occasions. I just think for me that didn't matter enough because I'm so, conservation is kind of...

in my veins, it's what drives me most. I just knew that the potential benefits way outweighed the risks. really what drove it. If you asked me at that time, ordinarily, would you like to go on a flight from Russia to the UK in a small paramotor? I would have said, not hope in hell. It wouldn't have been my choice of.

an ideal, beautiful place, maybe a couple of flights in the Arctic, but the whole journey, definitely not. But because of the purpose, the cause and the numbers of people, like the amount of power you could unlock from doing it, just felt to me worthwhile. So I pretty much stopped questioning it.

Sam Penny (52:51)
Yeah, fantastic. Now, every great journey, it always leaves you changed. How did the flight of the swans change you? Not just as a biologist, but as a person.

Sacha Dench (53:00)
Wow, if anything, so I guess it's made the world feel a bit smaller when you go from Nenets people living in the Arctic, migrating north and south, following the reindeer herds, living in small tents and, you know, like only sort of shoulder height to me. You think about their lives and they seem very distant, but having flown from them all the way across all those borders, the borders kind of disappear, really. You see a genuine, I guess,

a general transition between all of them. And I met enough people to know, know, there's quite a few, the Nenets people feel quite like Australian outback communities, very resourceful. I kind of made the world feel a bit smaller and a bit friendlier.

I became very tolerant to the cold. I came back to the UK and for the first time I can remember I wasn't wearing a jacket indoors. I was like wanting to sit near the window. That only lasts a few weeks though, unfortunately. But also my brain, found it because I'd been very focused on a task and reading a sky and instruments and everything else all that time. I became much more detail oriented.

And when I tried to do my relatively creative job within a few weeks of coming back, I found it very difficult because my brain was in a very different mode and I had been doing that intensely for a if anything, it made me realize that actually, if you really want to do something, if you're prepared to put in the hours and the training, then quite a lot more is possible, even through your brain and your body than maybe you think, you know, I'm not gifted at that.

work at it bit harder and you never know. And I guess a huge empathy for people of all of those flights landing with strangers as only one of my landings did I not get a welcome and helpful reception from people. And that was a school in Rochester in Kent in a school grounds. The grounds manager didn't want me on his grass.

Sam Penny (54:53)
Typical Groundskeepers They're brutal. What was the end outcome of flight of the swans? What changes were made to the migratory birds and the way that people tried drive conservation without borders? name of your organization.

Sacha Dench (55:11)
The major outcome from the project was that the next five yearly count of the swans was the first time in 25 years that the numbers of swans not only stopped declining, but actually had made a small increase. And so that was a really big win, but it's not because a crazy lady decided to fly with the birds. What we managed to do was convince,

people from all the different threats to the birds to step up and help and be leaders in some way. So for example, the hunters up in the Russian Arctic, all those people I asked to help me with logistics in the early days, they were the ones, they were a target audience for us. One in three birds has got shot in their bodies and they're being shot at somewhere. And so I'd spoken to lots of different communities, but they ended up forming that thing called the Swan Champion Network, which included everything from the tourism hunting bodies to the Nenets's people and others.

because they realized that they actually knew where the hunting was happening and why and what to do about it. And so they became big collaborators of ours up in the Arctic and that's carried on for years. I put out broad calls about the loss of wetlands in certain areas and at one group in Poland, a load of fish farmers came to us and said, well, we drain the fish ponds that we use now that used to be wetlands. We drain them about a month before the swans arrive.

to clear them out for the next load of fish in the next year. But we could do that two months later if that would help. And we were like, yes, yes, please, because there's now no wetlands in that whole stretch. We had kite surfers agreeing to not use half of a lake, this massive great lake ⁓ on the edge of Lithuania, which is ideal for swans on migration. It's one of their stopovers between the Russian Arctic, the next big one.

It's lovely and shallow, perfect for learning kite surfers, but also just the right neck length for a swan who puts its head down and wants to feed on the bottom. So they agreed to only use half of it. So the birds weren't constantly being disturbed after they were arriving on migration. we basically had that happen again and again and again. so them then telling the stories to others in their industry. We had a power company in Estonia ⁓ who had

had the most horrific set of power lines that kill lots of birds since 1967 or something that power line had been there and locals had said, like hundreds of swans die every year on these lines. We'd managed to convince them that they were killing enough to be wiping out a population. And then by the next year, they had removed half of them, put diverters on the others. And then just last year, they buried the last of them all in an undersea cable.

we managed to people things from a different light. And to be honest, the power company had said, to be honest, they'd been saying for many years, this is too difficult. They said it was very hard to see somebody strap a paramotor on their back in winter and run and take off and fly thousands of kilometers with swans and say, for our company and our engineers, this is too hard. it had different influence on people in different ways, but...

That's the main thing. And I think we also approached everybody with empathy, all the potential villains, like actually they were our potential closest allies. And that's probably what really worked. The swans, the flying with the swans got their attention. It gave me a different overview on things, but it also was a foot in the door to making friends with a lot more people.

Sam Penny (58:31)
Wow, absolutely remarkable. Look, Sasha, most of us, we're not going to fly with swans. We're not going to strap a propeller to our back. But in all honesty, bravery shows up in other ways. So what lessons do you think from your expeditions can someone apply to their everyday life?

Sacha Dench (58:50)
finding your your best life is obviously not many people said many times, it's definitely not about economic success. But I think you'll we'll all look back and decide on our lives and decide whether it was rewarding enough by whether we

led a life which was sort of true to ourselves, where we combined the things that we are passionate about, the things that we think are important, and also the skills, the talents that we bring. So where we feel we can really have an impact. If whatever happens, if you can keep searching for where those are and what they are, ⁓ then I think that is where you find a kind of a life that's felt worth living.

I remember a moment with my dad right before the trip that he called me up and he said, I'm hearing in the media that it's really dangerous. How dangerous is it? And I honestly had a moment of looking inside myself and going, ⁓ it's, there are lots of dangers that I can't account for. I've done everything I can. And I honestly think though, this is going to be worth it for the impact. And I think I'm probably the

I really am the person to do it. So it was a combination of all of those things. And the fact that I could honestly say to my dad, I'm happy to take the risks that I can see, I'm happy to take them because I think this is going to be worth it, worth it for me was a good sign.

Sam Penny (1:00:17)
Every single person on the planet has the opportunity to make at least some small change on the future of the globe. Your impact has really been amplified. How much personal satisfaction do you take in knowing that through your actions, you're leaving the world in a better place?

Sacha Dench (1:00:38)
I feel like probably for me that's one of the only things that matters. I I want to have left it the world, but also the people that I've interacted with, that's also important. I want to have brought as much positive as possible. Yeah, I think that that's the most important. I remember so vividly a moment of being about...

Sam Penny (1:00:58)
Hmm.

Sacha Dench (1:01:01)
I would have been about, I don't know, six or seven years old and I was just playing in the grass. And I was very flexible as a kid, but I remember like lying back and then like, you know, can flip your knees over your head. This is going somewhere. I know it sounds weird. You can kind of flip your knees over your head. so that I could actually, I was looking at the sky and gripping the grass with my hands. Okay. I don't know why it makes it was important to be like contorted like that, but it kind of was, it was a bit discombobulating.

and I was hanging onto the grass. And I remember thinking, just imagine if I was hanging off the planet and if I let go with my hands, I would actually fall out into the sky and out into space. And I had a really profound moment there of going, God, the planet is really important. that, what is there? And ⁓ I feel like that had quite a massive impact on me of realizing actually that this planet is essentially my home.

And so I think I've always felt like that, where I reside and sort of house building I have feels sort of temporary, whereas what is really important to me is the world.

I was kind of little dot little speck in there in nothing.

But the impact that I had was where I interacted with someone who was who'd figured out how they could help locally. So pretty much all the impact that happens is in local environments or in an industry that you know a lot about, like the fish farmers like the farmers, I guess I feel like I acted as a

as a kind of an instigator or a fire starter, I gave people permission and told them actually that yes, this is important.

Sam Penny (1:02:36)
Now, I always love the listener something that they can take away, something that they can learn from. And you've shown such great courage through all of the stories that you've shared with us today. What do you think is one small act of courage that someone listening could take tomorrow that could change their trajectory?

Sacha Dench (1:02:59)
most people have dreams or have had dreams of things they would like to do that I have always put on the back burner. I would say dare to a map to how to get there, which is what I exactly what I did with the flight of the swans. I found myself thinking through it and imagining in a lot more detail what...

it could actually be and look like rather than putting the idea straight back into the bottom drawer. Have the, I guess, the courage and the confidence to imagine ⁓ what it might look like and feel like to get there and how you might get there. And you might find that just by imagining that and taking time to break it down into lots of individual steps, which is exactly how I saw the flight of the swans. I saw that as a lot of short flights, like lot of two hour flights, because it was cold.

It wasn't 7,000 kilometers I had to tackle in one. Could I tackle each one individually? Yes, I think I could do that. Or I could find a way, or I could find a person who could help with doing that. And then slowly it all starts to feel a lot more real and a lot more possible.

Sam Penny (1:03:58)
That approach Sacha is just so important. The thought of flying 7,000 kilometres from the Russian Arctic down to the UK would be so overwhelming for absolutely everyone on the planet. But when you break it down, like you say, each flight, and with many of the other adventurers that I've had on the show, they are doing what many, and even for them,

they find so overwhelming. But when you break it down, well, what do I need to do in the next half hour or the next hour? All I needed to do is focus on the next step and the next step, because every single step, regardless of how big it is, is progress towards your dream.

Sacha Dench (1:04:39)
Yep, absolutely.

Sam Penny (1:04:41)
Okay,

now, Sasha, I always love to finish off our shows with the Brave Five. It's a rapid fire questions. There's five of them. They don't relate to each other. And I just want the first thing that pops into your head because that's always the most fun. Are you ready?

Sacha Dench (1:04:57)
Okay.

Sam Penny (1:04:58)
All right, now what's the most unexpected takeaway from your journeys?

Sacha Dench (1:05:02)
Rotten fish can taste okay.

Sam Penny (1:05:04)
⁓ I think I need a little bit more information there.

Sacha Dench (1:05:04)
You

The Nenets taught me when I say, have I landed in the of nowhere with no food, how do I survive? And they said, fish, if you get these two types of fish, they won't kill you no matter how rotten they are, as long as it's these two species. And they then fed me a fish that had been in a vat for like two months and was disintegrating and I didn't get sick.

Is that an unexpected one? It tasted like quite rotten fish, but as long as you spread it really, really thinly on something, it's a bit like a really strong, tangy fish sauce maybe, but slightly more on the nose.

Sam Penny (1:05:30)
How did it taste?

⁓ my God. Okay. Let's move on to the second question now. The first emotion, the first emotion you felt after landing from the channel crossing.

Sacha Dench (1:05:46)
Okay, sorry.

I cried a lot because I was home and I was surrounded all those scientists and a lot of people kind of hugging me so it felt like it was the first time I think I dared to believe that actually it was happening it wasn't just a kind of partial success we'd actually done it and I had all the most amazing people that I've done it for there with me so I burst into tears.

Sam Penny (1:06:18)
Wow, that must have been such a beautiful moment.

Sacha Dench (1:06:19)
Yeah, it was pretty, it was pretty beautiful moment.

Sam Penny (1:06:22)
Okay, third question. What was one thing you wish you knew before starting Flight of the Swans?

Sacha Dench (1:06:28)
maybe the kind of project I was going to do, that I should think about it myself, like a bit like a stage diver. So we were launching into a crowd of people and that crowd of people were everywhere from Russia to the UK. And that every time I ended up in a sticky situation, there would be somebody that would jump in and

fill that hole and keep the whole project flying.

Sam Penny (1:06:55)
that's cool. Now, habit or a mindset that made the biggest difference?

Sacha Dench (1:06:59)
doing something every day repeatedly really, really can, even when it's a physical skill can make you amazing at it. I think I'd seen that in theory, but I don't think I really believed it. By the time I got to Belgium, I was flying with...

very experienced pilots who were all going, what, how can you fly like that? And it was just because I'd been doing it all day, every day. I was doing things that I thought were pretty basic, but it was involving bringing lots of different skills altogether. But because I'd been working at that for the previous two and a half months, I had just become way better at it than I thought I would ever be.

Sam Penny (1:07:38)
All right, Sasha, the last the Brave Five, the best advice you've ever received on an expedition.

Sacha Dench (1:07:44)
probably be from Yuri asking me to look for allies in unusual places. Hence the Judi Dench and the James Bond connection. I would not have thought of going for a celebrity at all. can I tell you, maybe there's one thing.

after my injury, so I'm now wear double lower leg external prosthetics on my legs. I don't paint the same picture, I suppose, as being a bit of a superhero landing out of the sky in my flying machine. I have a clear impediment to walking and moving some of the time.

And I'd thought that that was essentially I was losing my superpower like that. And in fact, what I found traveling, following the Ospreys all the way down into Africa, that it's almost, I've had almost the opposite effect. So whereas in the past people could look at what I was doing and go, okay, well, you're a bit of a superhero and no wonder you can do amazing things. I can't do anything like that and sort of turn away and not consider trying. And now I see in fact,

had a group of fishermen in Morocco saying actually no, like, we can look at you and say if you're prepared to do difficult things for nature in the state that you're in, what's our excuse?

So actually, if you have something that you feel is some sort of a disability that actually can be a, it can be turned into a strength or a deficiency or disability or whatever, that might perhaps be your main strength.

Sam Penny (1:08:55)
that's fantastic.

love it, love it.

Sasha Dench, thank you so much for reminding us that bravery doesn't always look like fearlessness. Sometimes it looks like fear strapped to your back and the decision to fly anyway. Your story isn't about paramotors or records. It's about choosing to act when the easiest choice

is to stay grounded. And that choice is open to every single person listening. You don't need a flock of swans or an electric flight challenge to change your life. You just need the courage to take that first step into your own impossible. Because one day, someone will look at you and ask, why do think you could do that? And if you've said yes, even once, you'll have an answer that just might change the world.

Sasha, for those inspired by your journey, how can they follow your work and get involved?

Sacha Dench (1:09:57)
on Instagram, Facebook, through our website, Conservation Without Borders. Essentially, we're currently on an expedition again, and there's plenty of ways you can get involved in this one.

Sam Penny (1:10:07)
Excellent and for everybody listening I'll pop all of those links into the show notes to everyone listening if this conversation moved you share it with someone who needs to hear it subscribe so you don't miss the next story of ordinary people saying yes to the impossible because bravery spreads and Your share might just spark someone else's first step I'm Sam Penny and this is why do you think you could do that until next time keep saying yes to the impossible?