The Deep Pull of Open-Water Swimming
Patrick Joseph
Posted online: Sunday, 24 February 2002
San Francisco -- They enter the bay in ones and twos, clutching their shoulders or running in place as the waves lap ashore. A few plunge in without ceremony and swim out toward a course marked by white buoys.
Some tourists, having strayed to the far end of Fisherman's Wharf, look out at the scene and shiver. The water temperature on this particular day is in the mid-50s, and the swimmers, without exception, are sans wetsuit.
It's just another winter morning at the Dolphin Club, a 125-year-old organization devoted to swimming and rowing in San Francisco Bay and beyond.
Dolphin Clubbers are renowned for such feats of strength -- some might say fits of lunacy -- as swimming the two-mile span of the Golden Gate or the mile and a half from Alcatraz. The latter is a ritual repeated every New Year's Day.
Given that kind of strange activity, it's tempting to call the 900-member Dolphin Club unique, but it's not. The South End Club next door is a like-minded and elder rival, having been established in 1873. And around the country, a small but intensely devoted class of athletes dedicate themselves to the lonely art of open-water swimming.
Going strong
Indeed, the sport is going strong, especially in warm-water locales like Hawaii and Florida. But even in the cold and unsavory waters off Manhattan, people compete in long-distance races.
The annual Manhattan Island Marathon Swim celebrated its 20th season in 2001. A record 78 competitors left Battery Park last June 23 to circumnavigate the Big Apple, swimming up the East River and down the Hudson. Seattle's Morgan Filler, 25, won the event. She finished the 28.5-mile course in just under eight hours.
The Everest of the sport is still that frigid, Tide-swept span from Dover, England, to Calais, France. As Kathy Watson writes in her fascinating new book, "The Crossing: The Glorious Tragedy of the First Man to Swim the English Channel," there are longer swims and there are colder ones, "but in the worldwide community of Channel swimmers, that close-knit, watchful group of people who spend their free time face down in the water and who organize their lives according to tides and weather reports, you haven't made it until you've swum the Channel."
A true ordeal
Her subject, Matthew Webb, crossed the 21.6-mile Channel in 1875 in a 10-pound bathing suit, swimming breaststroke all the way. Considering the effect of the tides, he swam closer to 40 miles all told.
Toward the end of his ordeal he was half-blind and managing only 12 strokes a minute. With the landfall at Cap Gris Nez in sight and the Tide running against him, he cried to his crew in the pilot boat, "The sea is killing me by inches." But the Royal Navy captain endured the agony, and 22 hours after departing England, he stumbled ashore in France.
Thirty-six years would pass and 70 attempts end in failure before anyone repeated the feat. Webb gave us an adage as good as mountain climber George Leigh Mallory's "Because it's there," a reference to Mount Everest. "Nothing great is easy," Webb said. But today he is all but forgotten. He died in 1887 in an attempt to swim across the rapids of Niagara.
Since that time swimmers have accomplished the seemingly superhuman, lapping the English Channel twice or even three times. In 1987, New Zealander Philip Rush set the three-way record of 28 hours and 21 minutes.
Few actually succeed
As with the now-familiar hordes on Everest, such feats threaten to make crossing the Channel seem almost quaint, but it is still a grand achievement. According to Watson's book, of the 50 or so people who attempt to swim the Channel every year, only about five succeed. As of 1997, 511 had crossed it. Seven of those individuals were members of the Dolphin Club.
Today there is no prize money attached to swimming the English Channel, nor any fame to speak of. So why do people still do it?
Says veteran Channel pilot Mike Oram: "It changes everyone who does it. It reveals yourself to yourself. There's nothing to do out there but suffer and think." |
- The Buffalo News
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