Swimming to Antarctica

by Lynne Cox

  Then something began to happen underwater, and I was barely able to hold it together. There were fish, very large ones, moving below me. They might have been seals, dolphins, or sharks—I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t see anything below. The water was as black as the inside of a coffin. But I knew they were big: I could feel the water suddenly become hollow, and I could feel myself dropping down into the hole when they swam below me. It felt like I was being pulled down into an abyss, and fear rose again in me. Something big ran into my legs; I felt a thud and was spun halfway around. I couldn’t help myself—I screamed, a bloodcurdling scream.

  A school of fish—maybe grunion or anchovies—ricocheted off my body. Then some larger ones moved below. I shuddered.

  Pat suddenly let out a long, heart-stopping scream. A school of fish, maybe one hundred or more, attracted to the flashlight on his paddleboard, were flying out of the water like invisible torpedoes, smacking into his chest, flapping into his arms, and snapping against his hands.

  “It’s okay, they’re just flying fish. They won’t hurt you,” I said.

  “Come on, let’s go. If you stay there you’re going to get cold,” he said.

  He was right. I was freezing. I wasn’t generating any heat at all, and my fear seemed to exaggerate the effect of the cold. Still, I argued with him: “We’ve got to stay where we are. Weren’t you ever a Boy Scout? Don’t you know that when you get lost you’re supposed to remain in one place?”

  The crew was searching for us. They started by making a wide circle around where they had last seen us, then, accounting for time and drift, extending that circle. They were facing many of the same problems we were experiencing with the ships and the disorientation caused by the fog. Fortunately, the crew was very experienced. They had put out a call to the coast guard, informing them of our situation and requesting that they broadcast a warning to all shipping. The coast guard did just that and offered to help in the search if we weren’t found in the next hour.

  Meanwhile, Pat had decided that if he started paddling, I would follow him. “Come on, stay with me,” he yelled as he paddled into the blackness.

  I treaded water and watched him go. In a moment he’d disappeared. All I heard was the sound of his hands paddling. He shouted again at me. I didn’t respond. He turned the board around. “Where are you?”

  He was going to get us lost. Maybe forever.

  “Where are you?” His voice was becoming muffled.

  I felt fear surging in me. I started shaking. I don’t know if it was because I was scared or because I was cold.

  I didn’t want to follow him. But I didn’t want to lose him either. I couldn’t let him vanish. Something could happen to him.

  “I’m over here!” I was really afraid, more afraid than I’ve ever been in my life. He just didn’t get it. He didn’t understand what he was doing. He was endangering both of us. I guided him back to me with my voice.

  “Okay now will you follow me?” Pat asked. “You’ve got to keep going if you’re going to get across the channel. I’m sure we have to go in this direction,” he added with certainty.

  “No, I will not follow you. You don’t know where you are. You don’t know where you’re going.”

  “Come with me. Stop arguing. Just follow me,” he said, and he started to paddle.

  If we were going to survive, I had to keep him from paddling in a circle, from making it more difficult for the crew in the boats to find us. My words weren’t working. I reached up quickly and touched the board, disqualifying myself. As I did, everything in me felt like it was falling apart again. I didn’t want to stop. I didn’t want to quit. I didn’t want to fail. But I had to stop him.

  Pat looked at me with complete astonishment. “How could you do that?”

  “I don’t want to swim anymore. I don’t,” I said. I could feel myself choking up, all those horrible feelings I’d had in the Nile River rushing back, but I had to push them away.

  “It’s okay. Let’s pretend that you didn’t touch the board. You didn’t hang on or anything. Come on. Just swim with me,” he pleaded.

  There was no sign that the fog would lift, no sign of the Bandito or the dory. Nothing to indicate that they were going to find us anytime soon. So I reached up and grabbed the nose of his board and held on tight. I hated doing it. “I’m too cold to go any farther. I think I have hypothermia,” I said, not knowing if I did or didn’t, just trying to hold him in one place.

  “Okay, you can get on the board with me. Here, I’ll hold it— climb on,” he said.

  It took me a couple attempts to pull myself onto the board. When he got back on, I asked him to move beside me so we could keep each other warm. With both of us on the board, there was no room for him to paddle. We shouted into the fog, “We’re here! Over here!”

  Only foghorns and ship horns answered.

  Maybe it was only half an hour that we were lost, I don’t know exactly how long, but it seemed as if we were gone for a very long time. Before we could see them, we heard Stockwell’s booming voice and Johnson’s little one, and then they emerged from the fog. They had turned on every single light they had on board, and in the fog, they were surrounded by a halo of pure light.

  “Are you okay?” Stockwell asked.

  “Yes,” we both said.

  “We just spoke with Mickey. He thinks he knows where we are. It’s a good thing you stayed put or we’d never have found you. The Bandito is closing in on the circle, and they should be here soon,” Stockwell said, pulling alongside us. Johnson reached for my hand and hoisted me into the center of the dory, and Pat stayed on the board. This brought back memories of Egypt again. Wrapping my arms around my knees, I put my head down and closed my eyes, trying to stay warm.

  It was only half an hour or so later that the Bandito broke through the fog. When the crew helped me onto the boat, I completely lost it. I started crying really hard. My father and mother tried to soothe me. I felt so bad to be sobbing in front of Montrella, in front of the reporter for the Los Angeles Times and all the lifeguards. It got even worse when I saw Fahmy’s face. He knew exactly what I was feeling. I started crying even harder. I had been so scared. I didn’t realize it until we were safe, but then I’d let my defenses down. My father tapped me on the cheek with his hand, first gently, then harder, trying to snap me back to reality. He was afraid that I would become hysterical. I hated this scene. Hated giving up. Hated failing. Still, I wasn’t fully comprehending the lesson that I should have learned in Egypt: no swim, no athletic venture was worth dying over. There were times when you had to quit. Times when it was too dangerous to continue. Times when you should walk away and try again another day.

  That was exactly what my parents wanted me to do. That was what Fahmy urged me to do, and Stockwell and Johnson, and the entire crew. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to hang up my swimsuit forever. I had had enough.

  During the next week they worked on me. My folks said that I was in great shape and I had a great chance to break the record—why would I pass all that up? Fahmy called me and met with me a handful of times and told me that I really needed to go back again, that I was mentally tough, and that if I didn’t go back now, I would wonder all my life what I could have done. Stockwell and Johnson called to say they would go with me again, that they hadn’t been able to fulfill their promise to me. Montrella also encouraged me. He said that he knew I could make the swim. I was more prepared than ever before.

  There had been things about swimming from Catalina Island to the mainland that had bothered me. One major concern was my brother’s world record: I didn’t really want to break it. I knew how hard he had worked for it, and I knew how I felt when I had my English Channel record broken. I also wasn’t excited about having to cross the Catalina Channel again and then swim the distance we had just covered. So I discussed this with my parents and the crew and we decided that I would start at Point Vicente, near San Pedro.

  Two weeks after my initial attempt, we set out. The
night was perfectly calm, and the sky was filled with stars. We moved quickly offshore, and I broke through the current easily. My pace was a little faster than two and a half miles per hour. The two weeks of tapering had revived me, and I felt very strong. But something happened about halfway across the channel; I lost all motivation and bottomed out. John Sonnichsen, who had been on my previous attempt and had been on other people’s swims, said it was due to low blood sugar, and that I needed to stop to drink some juice.

  Calmly I told the crew, “I don’t want to do this.”

  “We’ve talked all about this, sweet. I thought you worked through it. Come on, you can do it,” my father said.

  “I don’t want to do it anymore. I don’t care,” I said, taking off my goggles.

  “You’re just going through a bad period right now. Put your goggles back on and keep swimming,” John Sonnichsen said, tossing me a red plastic bottle filled with apple juice. “You’ll feel better once you drink it,” he urged.

  I started swimming again, but three more times, I had my doubts about what I was doing out there.

  With the crew’s encouragement, however, I finally managed to pull my head together. After I’d been swimming for six hours, Sonnichsen told me that I was on record pace. And then it came back to me: I wanted to do this because I wanted to be good at something, and because I loved swimming. I loved being out on the open ocean with them, doing something so beautiful, risky, and tough.

  I pulled harder, laughed, joked with the crew. The crossing took me eight hours and forty-eight minutes, and I broke the men’s and women’s world records. I thought it was so cool my brother had the record in the other direction! I had succeeded and failed, and I had learned things that would become valuable later in my life. And so I began dreaming again, looking for swims that had never been done before.

  10

  Cook Strait, New Zealand

  After five hours of swimming between the North and South Islands of New Zealand, across the mighty Cook Strait, I was farther from the finish than when we’d started. The weather was deteriorating; it had been ever since I’d entered the water, although the weather forecasters had promised winds that would only be light and variable, with no surf at all. They were wrong: the waves were four feet high, crashing headfirst into us; the wind was already up to fifteen knots, churning the strait into chop; and I was physically and mentally exhausted. I had made an enormous mistake. From the onset of the swim, I’d thought this twelve-mile swim would take five hours, at most, to complete.

  Months before the channel crossing, I had spoken with Sandy Blewett, the swimmer from New Zealand I had met in Dover while preparing for the English Channel. I knew that one day she had wanted to swim Cook Strait and I knew it was her idea to be the first woman across. But she had attempted the English Channel and had had very poor conditions; she hadn’t been able to complete the swim. Phoning her, I’d asked her if she minded if I attempted the crossing before she had a go at it. She had no problem with that at all, and even offered to help. Sandy provided me with background information, and, based on my speed in the English Channel, I had thought Cook Strait would be a piece of cake.

  For more than four hours, John Sonnichsen had been shouting at me, using a bullhorn pressed against his mouth. Sonnichsen had offered to come to New Zealand as my adviser. I was getting into new territory now, and in this case, I was attempting a swim that a dozen people had tried but only three men from New Zealand had completed. Because Sonnichsen had experience setting up swims in areas that had rarely been swum, figuring out tides and currents, my folks had agreed to pay him and to send him with me to help on the swim, and also to be my chaperon. By profession, Sonnichsen was a physical education teacher in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, and he had a wife and three daughters. He was a good guy, but that bullhorn was driving me crazy. He had been shouting at me all morning long. I wanted to tear that bullhorn out of his hands and throw it into the ocean.

  Sonnichsen had just informed me that the tide had swept us back around the tip of the North Island and we had been steadily going backward for the past two hours. He hadn’t wanted to tell me because he’d thought I would be discouraged. Oh, he was right; I was.

  When I looked up to breathe, to confirm what he had just told me, off to my right side was the North Island, and I could see our starting point, jutting out ahead of us by three or four miles. When I lifted my head straight up, to see where the South Island should have been, all I saw in the distance was haze, and a sea of waves and heavy winds. It was impossible to think of continuing through it; I was exhausted. So was the crew.

  Accompanying me on paddleboards were lifeguards from the Island Bay Surf Lifesaving Club. They had been battling against the sea with me all morning long. And on the two boats ahead of us were Sam Moses, a journalist from Sports Illustrated; Keith Hancox, a radio announcer and one of the three men who had swum the strait; Sandy Blewett; John Cataldo, the head pilot; and his fishing crew. Some of the crew were getting seasick and were having difficulty standing without tumbling over.

  For more than five hours, I thought, I’ve been swimming across Cook Strait and no one told me I’ve been going backward most of this time? It occurred to me that something might be wrong, but I had no idea how wrong.

  Most of New Zealand knew what obstacles we would have to overcome; Keith Hancox had been broadcasting our progress—and lack of it—hourly over Radio Wellington, a local station on the North Island. More than anyone, Hancox knew what Cook Strait was all about. He knew how incredibly tough the crossing could be from a swimmer’s perspective, and he informed his listeners that I was really struggling. His listeners understood and related to it. Because Cook Strait separates the North and South Islands of New Zealand, most residents had crossed the strait by ferry.

  New Zealanders knew how terribly rough Cook Strait could be, and they got caught up in the story. Every hour they stopped whatever they were doing for an update. They told Hancox over the ship’s radio that they were as caught up in listening to the broadcast as they had been the day Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon. It was as if, one by one, people lit a million candles. Throughout New Zealand people turned on their radios, and interest grew so quickly that Radio Wellington canceled its normal programming and went to live national coverage. News stations from around the world had their reporters tune in.

  New Zealand was, after all, the land of Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mount Everest, and there was a certain national pride and character that was infused within them, too, a can-do attitude. People throughout the country began calling the boat. Mothers, fathers, sheep farmers, fishermen, Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, bee farmers, people from the most remote farms and villages called. When I started getting really discouraged, the paddler had me swim close to the lead boat so Keith Hancox could tell me what was happening. He was elated. “A Girl Scout just called in from Nelson. She said to tell you to keep going; she thinks you will make it. A farmer called a minute ago from Christchurch; he said to send you his best wishes. So many people are calling, Lynne, to wish you their best. You’ve got the entire country of New Zealand pulling for you,” he said.

  Cataldo had watched the weather reports on television the night before. A typhoon was hitting the Cook Islands, nearly fifteen hundred miles north of Cook Strait, and an Antarctic storm was raging about one thousand miles to the south. None of the forecasters thought the storms would affect us. But they did. Both storms were converging on Cook Strait, and we were sandwiched between them. That explained why the tides were so different from their normal pattern. It explained why we had been swept so far around the North Island. Although the storms were hundreds of miles from us, they were still affecting us. Without any landmasses to act as buffers, we were beginning to feel their effects as they continued their approach.

  I felt as if I were swimming through a washing machine on spin cycle. Breathing was nearly impossible. I tried breathing later than normal, delaying my inhalation, letting
my arms shield my face from the waves. But then my arms obscured my vision. That was dangerous. The skiff was becoming a real hazard. Cataldo was fighting to keep it on course, but the waves were lifting him four or five feet into the air, then tossing him sideways, right at me. I heard him shout, “Watch out, Lynne.”

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw the skiff smashing down into a trough. Cutting quickly left, I felt the propeller graze my leg. Cataldo pulled hard to the right, knowing now that he had to, opening the space between us. This made navigation even more challenging for both of us. There were periods of time, ten or twenty seconds, when we couldn’t see each other at all. It was nuts. I felt as if I were swimming all over the ocean.

  Sensing my frustration, a lifeguard from the support crew pulled his board closer to me. That made me feel better. There were sharks in Cook Strait, white pointers. A number of surfers had been killed by these sharks. We thought if there was any sign of a problem, such as a shark circling, I would get out. When in doubt, get out was always my axiom, but in this case, I don’t think we could really see anything.

  Lifting my head again—it was becoming a very bad habit—I looked toward the South Island. The sea was a mass of white waves breaking helter-skelter, without even the outline of the island on the horizon. I made a decision. Calmly, I pulled off my cap and goggles and shouted to Sonnichsen, “I don’t think I can go any farther. I want to get out.”