by Lynne Cox
“You also have to consider the record. If you swim from England to France, you have to break a faster time than if you go in the other direction. Let me get out my book and check the time. It was set by a Canadian named Helge Jensen twelve years ago. I was his pilot. His time was ten hours and twenty-three minutes. That record’s stood for twelve years. Corrie Ebbelaar, a Dutch swimmer, set the women’s world record. Her time was ten hours and forty-three minutes. Since you’re going for the record,” Brickell said, “you may want to swim from France to England.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging or anything, but I just want to do the fastest time. That’s really my goal. Mr. Brickell, which direction do you recommend?”
He gave it some thought and said, “I think it would be better for you to swim from England to France. That way you can start out fresh, you don’t have to worry about getting seasick in a boat traveling to France, and you don’t have to spend a lot of time waiting around there. Also I think you’re strong enough to break through the current off Cape Gris-Nez if it’s running fast on the day you swim, and I think it would be a feather in our cap if you could do the fastest time.”
In order to select the best weather conditions, Brickell monitored the weather every night when out in the Channel fishing. He also watched the weather forecast on television every afternoon. He didn’t say this, but I gathered from talking to him that he was an expert at both selecting the best day and piloting for a swimmer. He took pride in what he did. And he had honed his skills until he was the best. He had taken the greatest number of world-record-breaking swimmers across the English Channel, but he said he had never taken a swimmer who was so young who wanted to break the world record. That intrigued him, and I could tell by that flicker of light in his blue eyes that he was very interested in working with me. He never said it, because he was very humble, but he knew better than anyone how important a role the pilot played in getting a swimmer across the Channel. With an ordinary pilot, all that could be expected was an ordinary swim. Pilot and swimmer work in many ways like a mountain climber climbing Mount Everest and a Sherpa; one could not succeed without the technical ability of the other. Brickell believed he had the knowledge and expertise to get me across in world-record time if I could swim fast enough, and he understood that he would have to draw on everything he knew to give me that opportunity. He loved that challenge, and he made it clear that he wanted to pilot me.
We stepped outside his home and he showed us the Helen Anne Marie 137, his forty-five-foot-long fishing boat, anchored in Dover Harbour. It was an old boat, and its chains and lines were rusted, but it had been freshly painted and was clean and inviting. He would have taken us on board, but the tide was out and the boat was too low in the harbor for us to climb aboard. The Helen Anne Marie had a wet stack. This wasn’t good; it meant that engine fumes were released into the water. The fumes could make a swimmer sick or cause headaches. The exhaust area was on the left side of the boat, so his solution was to have me swim on the right side and forward, near the bow. If he had his choice, he liked to have a swimmer there or beside the pilot’s cabin, so that he could keep track of the swimmer throughout the crossing.
On every Channel crossing he had at least one deckhand. On my crossing he wanted to have the best, his fourteen-year-old son, Reg Brickell Jr. Brickell asked if we had spoken with the Channel Swimming Association and if they had lined up an official for me, a man named Mickey Moreford. When I told him yes, Brickell lit up and said Mickey was the best.
The fee for the swim would be roughly one thousand dollars. The agreement was that once a swimmer set off, the pilot would be paid, whether the swimmer swam only one hundred meters or the entire distance across the Channel. There was no negotiating on this point. The Channel Swimming Association also got paid a fee, for supplying an official to monitor the swim and the condition of the swimmer and to ensure that the swim was achieved under English Channel swimming rules. The swim began as soon as the swimmer’s foot touched the water and finished when the swimmer fully cleared the water on the other side. The swimmer couldn’t touch anyone or anything during the swim and could not use any type of flotation equipment, fins, or paddles. The swim had to be done under the swimmer’s own powers of endurance. A swimmer could eat during the crossing; in fact, it was the swimmer’s responsibility to provide food for the entire crew as well. The only thing a swimmer had to keep in mind was that during the feeding time, he or she could float on his or her back and feed but could not touch any of the crew or hold on to the boat. Food was tossed to the swimmer much the way a seal is fed.
While some swimmers crossed the Channel during the day, Brickell preferred night. The wind was less strong; the water was calmer. Would I be okay with swimming at night? he asked. I had no problem with it at all. In fact, I told him, I loved the serenity of being on the water at night. He smiled. We liked each other. I had a very good feeling about him. He was confident in himself and in his abilities, and I think he felt the same way about me. I was so eager to swim.
The first tides that Brickell would have available would be in two weeks, at the beginning of July. I was thrilled that I might be able to swim across the English Channel on the Fourth of July. But if the weather wasn’t favorable on July 4th or during that week, an Australian swimmer named Des Renford had the next set of tides booked with Brickell, so I would have to wait until after the end of the month for another chance. I didn’t like the idea of having to wait at all. I was already set to go, and it was hard for me to think that I was going to have to wait around two weeks for my attempt. If I didn’t get to swim then, all my training would be thrown off, and somehow I’d have to stay in shape but be rested.
Brickell asked me if there was anything else I needed to know. For the time, I told him, I had run out of questions. He suggested that I meet with Mickey Moreford in the next couple of days, just so we would get to know each other. I’m sure Brickell wanted me to meet Mickey because he was so enthusiastic. He was a complete English Channel swimming fan.
The next day my mother and I were invited to Mickey Moreford’s home in Folkestone. Mickey was an older man, perhaps in his sixties; he was thin and slightly stooped over. He also had a wife who retired to another room, as well as a blue-eyed blind dalmatian named Buster that he loved beyond words.
Mickey was excited about my goal. He told us stories of all the successful swims he had been on as the official observer. He opened a scrapbook and showed us the signed black-and-white photos of swimmers from twenty years before. He said that he would hold a page in his scrapbook for me. When he turned the page, he said, “Oh, this is the Greek swimmer.” Tears came to Mickey’s eyes, and his voice tightened.
The Greek swimmer had been swimming from England to France. He was a young man in his late twenties or early thirties, and he was a strong swimmer. He made good progress until he reached the French coast and the tide changed. He fought it but couldn’t get across. He kept swimming, although he complained of feeling cold. Then he passed out in the water. It was as if the entire scene were replaying in Mickey’s mind: “The pilot and I jumped into the skiff and rowed over to ’im. ’E was facedown in the water, so I jumped in with my clothes on and rolled ’im over. ’E wasn’t breathing. Somehow, the pilot grabbed ’im by the hair and we lifted him into the skiff and then into the boat. We ’ad a doctor on board, and ’e listened to the Greek swimmer’s ’eart with a stethoscope. He couldn’t hear a ’eartbeat, so ’e tried doing a ’eart massage. That didn’t work, so the doctor cut ’is chest open with a knife and tried to massage ’is ’eart by pumping it with ’is ’and. Ah, it was terrible, love. The doctor wasn’t able to save ’im.
“Oh, don’t you worry, missus. Your daughter will be fine. She has more body fat than the Greek did, and it will help her stay warm. She’s also a much faster swimmer than ’e was. Don’t you worry,” he said, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand.
“Does this happen often—do people go in
to hypothermia?” my mother asked.
“Ah, yes, love, swimmers get very cold in the Channel. Sometimes they ’ave to get out because of the cold. But I’ve never been on any other swim when someone died. I hope I never do. Now let’s get back to more ’appy things,” he said. He showed us other pictures of successful swimmers and then explained what we should expect. He suggested that we stay in touch with him and urged us to call him if we had any questions at all. Then he gave us both a big hug and told me, “I’m sure you’re going to do this, love. From the moment I saw you, I knew; you are strong and able to break that record.”
The next day my mother and I rode the bus to Dover and I began swimming in Dover Harbour.
It was even more beautiful than Fahmy had described: the white cliffs were higher, more magnificent, and brighter white than I’d ever imagined. The water in the harbor was a clear, vibrant gray-blue. And when I listened to the waves, I heard Fahmy say, “You can hear the waves caressing the little pebbles. It is a very beautiful place.”
I imagined how it must have been for him the first time he stepped into the water and started swimming. I felt that he was very near me as I started my own workout, and I was excited to finally be training in Dover Harbour. Just outside the harbor walls was the English Channel, the place I had been dreaming about for what seemed like forever.
When I got into the water, I was glad I was conditioned to the cold. The water temperature was in the high fifties, and I had to swim fast to stay warm. First I headed toward the white cliffs for half a mile, then back toward the pier. As I swam, my mom walked along the beach with me, but with a lot of difficulty. The beach tilted at a sharp angle, so after the first lap I suggested that she sit and watch me from the beach.
While I was swimming, I saw another swimmer enter the water. He swam over to me and introduced himself. He said that his name was Des Renford, he was from Australia, and he was training to swim the Channel both ways. He told me he had been watching me and I looked pretty fast. He asked me my name and if I wanted to pace—to swim at the same speed as him. I was thrilled to meet him, and I told him that Reg Brickell had told me about him. Des asked if Brickell was my pilot too. He said that he had had other pilots for the crossing, but Reg Brickell was the finest. He explained that there were a few pilots who didn’t care about the swimmer and were just into Channel swimming for the money. They would take swimmers out on an attempt knowing that the weather was going to be bad; the swimmer would fail and they would be able to collect their money in a short amount of time.
We had a very good workout together. Des said that I was faster than he was. But I wasn’t by much, so I really enjoyed swimming with him. He told me about some of the other swimmers he thought I’d like. A swimmer from New Zealand named Sandy Blewett would be attempting the Channel for the first time. It wasn’t unusual, Des recounted, for swimmers to attempt the Channel four or five times. Sandy was just a few years older than I was. There was also another unusual swimmer from Florida named Stella Taylor. She was in her forties and had been a nun for many years in a convent in England.
A few days later, during a training session, I met both Sandy and Stella. They had been working out together when my mother and I arrived. Sandy was from Auckland, New Zealand, from the North Island, and for years she had dreamed of swimming the English Channel and then, one day, perhaps becoming the first woman to swim between the North and South Islands of New Zealand. This swim was only ten miles, but the currents between the two islands were fierce. Only three men had achieved the crossing.
As we treaded water in the harbor, Stella spoke about her years in the convent, how she was so happy to be free and how she had once been invited to Bahrain by a sheikh, to swim in the Persian Gulf. She said the sheikh had fallen in love with her. He’d especially loved her blond hair, but he could not marry a Christian, so she’d returned to England and decided to swim the English Channel. Stella was a very slow swimmer but she was very determined, and I enjoyed meeting with her and Sandy and listening to stories of the convent and New Zealand. There was a real sense of camaraderie between us, and with the other swimmers we met during our training swims. There was a large team from Egypt, a swimmer from India, three or four English swimmers, and a man from Texas.
After the first week of workouts, the tides became favorable for me. Every night after the weather forecast I called Reg Brickell, and every night Brickell said that a storm front had stalled off the English coast and the sea was too rough for us to go. It was hard being on standby for five days straight, and even worse when July 6, the last possible day for my set of tides, passed. Now I would have to continue training and wait to see if Des got favorable weather for a double.
Des and I continued working out each day in the harbor. We pushed each other when we worked out, applauded each other, and kept each other motivated. He was a good friend.
After workouts my mother and I took small trips to explore England and take a mental break from the Channel. We needed to get away, to think about something else, and to learn something. We took bus trips to Canterbury Cathedral and to a butterfly farm in Wye; we explored the small seaside town of Deal and climbed to the top of the white cliffs to explore Dover Castle. We also explored English cuisine and decided that England not only had fantastic fish and chips, but excellent ethnic cuisine, especially Chinese and Indian.
When Des’s tides arrived, at the end of July, the low-pressure region finally started to move. The weather through the first and second days of Des’s tides wasn’t calm enough for Des to attempt the swim. But by the third afternoon, the British flag in the center of the harbor, which we had been watching every single day, was not even wavering. I thought that Des must have been given the green light to go ahead with his swim that evening. We hadn’t seen him, so I assumed he was preparing his bags, getting the food together, and taking some extra rest.
In late afternoon Mickey Moreford arrived at our hotel in Folkestone. He was completely out of breath, bent over and gasping for air. We waited, concerned that he was going to have a heart attack. Ages passed, it seemed, before he caught his breath. Then he said, “Brickell’s been trying to reach you all day long. He’s rung you up a dozen times. And he sent me to find you.”
Conditions would not be good enough for a double, so Des had stepped aside to let me have his tides, exchanging his tides for mine, if I agreed. Sure, I told Mickey, leaping into the air, wanting to race off and thank Des and get my swim bag packed, all at once. Mickey said that Des could have held on to the tides until the very last minute, hoping the conditions would improve, but he wanted to release them now to allow me to prepare. He was a real class act.
Mickey had further instructions: “Take a cab to Shakespeare Beach, Dover. Be there by eleven p.m. to grease up, and be ready for a midnight start. I will be coming round with Brickell. Reg Junior will row me ashore in the launch so I can see you begin and start the watch. Then we’ll ’ave your mother climb into the launch with us, and we’ll take her out to the Helen Anne Marie.”
I tried to rest that afternoon in my hotel room, but there was just no way I could relax. Hours dragged by. Finally my mother and I had dinner, watched some television, and caught a cab at ten-thirty The cab driver was surprised when my mother asked him to take us to Shakespeare Beach.
“Are you a Channel swimmer?” he asked looking in the rearview mirror.
“Yes, she is,” my mother said proudly.
“Well, you don’t look like a Channel swimmer to me. You’re too fat to be one,” he said.
That hurt, and it made me angry. How would he know what a Channel swimmer looked like anyway? “Well, I am one,” I said, wanting to explain that my body fat would help keep me warm; that is why dolphins, seals, and whales have extra insulation.
When the cab reached the cliffs overlooking Shakespeare Beach, the driver let us out and then said, “Well, good luck to you anyway— but you certainly don’t look like a Channel swimmer.”
We crossed an o
ld railroad bridge and walked down at least a hundred tiny steps to the beach. It reminded me of the cove at Catalina, but the white cliff walls of Shakespeare Beach reflected the moonlight, and it was a lot easier to see. We walked across the pebbles and huge clumps of brown kelp to the edge of the shore, where I pulled off my sweats and placed them in my swim bag.
After my mother opened two large jars of lanolin, oil residue from sheep’s wool that is used by Channel swimmers for insulation, she pulled on gloves and smeared handfuls of it on my neck, shoulders, and underarms and around the bottom of my swimsuit. The lanolin was nasty stuff, worse than Vaseline. Pale yellow and as sticky as marshmallow cream, it smelled worse than a dead sheep.
Then we waited. A cool breeze circled the cove, waves slid into shore along the pebbles, and I smiled as I thought of Fahmy We had phoned home to let the family know the swim was on. My father had promised to tell Fahmy and Coach Gambril. They would be waiting by the radio for news.
We first heard Mickey’s excited voice: “We’re ’ere, love. We’re ’ere.” He was standing up in the boat, trying to climb out before Reg Junior had landed.
Mickey jumped out into ankle-deep water, jogged up the beach to us, and said, “Are you ready, love?”
“Yes, Mickey, I am very ready.”
“This is very exciting,” my mother said. She handed the gear to Reg Junior, and he helped her into the launch. Mickey followed her, then said, “Let me ’ave a look at my watch. You too, Reg Junior. Let’s synchronize our watches so we get these two times plus the stopwatch. Right, you ready, love? Okay, go.”
I jogged into the water, dove under the waves, and began sprinting. No doubt I would be swimming for hours, but there was always a coastal current, and I wanted to get through it quickly. I didn’t want to take the coastal tour of England. Besides that, my body was flowing with adrenaline. This time I was going for the record and I didn’t have to wait for anyone; I could swim at my own pace, flat out, or go slower whenever I wanted to or needed to.
