Swimming to Antarctica

by Lynne Cox

  “Just swim another half mile,” Sonnichsen coaxed through the megaphone.

  I wanted to drown that megaphone.

  “You’re going through a bad period,” he said.

  You’re not kidding, I thought.

  “Here, have some apple juice,” he said.

  I wished I had a cork. If I had a cork, I could stick it into that megaphone, and then I wouldn’t have to hear him.

  The apple juice tasted sweet, delicious. I grabbed my knees to stretch out my back. The crew in the boat waved, cheered, and shouted encouraging words. Keith Hancox told me I was doing an incredible job. He said he had never seen a swimmer persevere through conditions like this. He was very impressed. That gave me a real lift. I respected him—now more than ever since I understood what he had achieved—and his encouragement helped me find my resolve.

  For the next half an hour we made progress, but the seas were relentless. They were cresting at five feet, and when I lifted my head and looked at the size of the space between us and the horizon, I pulled off my cap again and said, “I really can’t go any farther.” Memories of the Nile River flooded my mind; that level of exhaustion was something I never wanted to repeat. I was so tired.

  Sandy Blewett jumped into the water and swam over to me. “Come on, let’s see some of that Cox courage,” she said, which got me moving again. She swam for half an hour with me, then had to climb out. She had had a back injury before this attempt, and she was in pain. I knew she was the one who had courage. For a while after she got out, I continued, but I felt discouraged.

  Captain Brown, the pilot for the Aritaka, a cross-channel passenger ferry, changed the course of his ship and raced over to us. It was against the rules of his company, but in his mind I was a ship in distress, and he was determined to help. He pulled the ship alongside us and raised the American flag, while hundreds of passengers climbed out on deck. They waved and cheered and stayed beside us for ten or twenty minutes.

  When they left, Keith Hancox shouted, “I spoke with Captain Brown on the radio. He told me that all of New Zealand is following your progress. All the boats that pass between the islands and all the planes that fly overhead have been watching you all day long.” His voice was filled with both excitement and fatigue.

  I was overwhelmed. It didn’t matter to them that I wasn’t from their country.

  The waves in Cook Strait were up to seven feet high now. I could just make out the outline of the South Island. How am I ever going to do this? I wondered. Keep going. Just keep going, and for a while I did, but my attitude was quickly turning for the worse.

  Keith Hancox waved me over to the boat and suggested that I stop and drink some apple juice. He told me, “All day long, local yachtsmen and fishermen have been radioing us, and giving us updates on the water condition out ahead. Air New Zealand has been following our progress too; they’ve been radioing our boats, giving us weather updates.” Then he pointed. “Look up there in the sky.”

  An Air New Zealand jet was circling overhead, and it dipped its wing to salute us.

  Hancox turned to pick up the radio, listened, then turned to me and said excitedly, “The prime minister of New Zealand, Prime Minister Rowling, just called. He said to tell you, ‘We believe you can cross the mighty Cook Strait. You can do it. You have the entire nation of New Zealand behind you.’”

  I looked at the ocean. The waves were now eight feet high, too big to take in all at once; I had to tip my head back to see an entire wave. I prayed, “Please, God, I can’t do this without your help. I need the waves to go down. I need you to make something happen. I can’t do this.” I put my head down and started swimming again. The winds were shifting all around, blasting us from one direction, then the other, and they had increased to thirty-five knots. When I reached the crest of a wave I looked across the sea, and there was the South Island. It was getting larger, sharper.

  I put my head down. My arms felt like they were on fire. Everything ached. I buried my head, hoping to get lower in the water so I wouldn’t become airborne, so I could let the waves wash over me, so I could go through the heart of them and continue to move forward.

  “Robbie, what was that?” I shouted to a lifeguard on the paddleboard.

  A large, dark streak had brushed beneath me, and it had moved quickly.

  Robbie peered down into the water. “It’s probably the reflection of the boat,” he said, but he continued looking down.

  “There it is!” I shouted with my head up, feeling myself swimming rapidly on the upper inches of the water.

  Robbie’s eyes got as large as saucers, and he shouted to the crew, “Check below!”

  Before they could say or do anything, five large black forms broke the water’s surface.

  “They’re dolphins,” Cataldo shouted gleefully, making a dolphin move with his hand.

  Two black-and-white dolphins that looked like they were wearing tuxedos swam right beneath us. In unison, they rolled over on their backs and looked up at us. I could see their big brown eyes as they rolled over simultaneously. Suddenly three more leaped out of the water in front of us.

  “Those are the scouts. They’re having a good look at us,” Cataldo shouted. He was laughing, knowing what was going to happen next.

  Moments later the sea was filled with the voices of dolphins chattering, squeaking, clicking, whistling, calling. Their voices were fast and excited. Pods of dolphins arrived. There were twenty, then thirty, and when I looked down through the crystal-clear water, I saw dolphins below, and dolphins below them, and yet more dolphins. They were threading their way between one another, moving in close, rotating onto their sides so they could look up and see us better. It seemed as if they were happy, as if they somehow knew we needed them. It was inspiring. Maybe they were the answer to my prayer.

  In unison, two dolphins swimming snout to snout rolled over and gazed up at me. They held that position on their sides for maybe an entire minute, as if they were checking me out. They were clicking and whistling back and forth, communicating with each other and with others nearby. When they rolled back over, I wanted to reach down and just touch them. Extending my arm, I tried to get closer, but they maintained a distance of at least a couple of arm’s lengths. The wind died slightly, too, and the sea grew flatter.

  More dolphins, perhaps fifty in total, arrived en masse and completely circled our flotilla. Then, as if someone had given a signal, a dozen tuxedoed dolphins began dancing on their tails across the bright blue sea. Some were leaping high out of the water over lacy white waves, while others pirouetted in the air and dove beak-first deep into the sea. They popped up around us chattering, as if they were laughing at their antics.

  Mesmerized, we watched them put on a display unlike anything we had ever seen. The dolphins entertained us for more than an hour, and then they departed as suddenly as they had arrived.

  We had made progress; the South Island was now coming clearly into view. We could distinguish mountains in the foreground and in back, and what was once only black in the distance was now becoming shades of green, brown, and gold. Patterns and the coarse textures of trees, grass, shrubs, and rock were taking shape.

  Right then, Sonnichsen leaned over the bow of the San Antonio and gave me the bad news over the megaphone. “You’re caught in a rip. It’s carrying you back out toward the middle of the strait. You’re going to have to start sprinting now if you’re going to get in.”

  Nodding, I put my head down and started counting my strokes from one to one thousand, five times over. And I focused on just moving forward. On a breath, I saw Sonnichsen giving me the thumbs-up sign. We had made it across. Ten hours of swimming. Somehow the dolphins must have sensed it, because a pod of twenty or so returned, and this time they moved in closer to me, a hand’s distance away. Every part of me wished I could hold on to their fins and just ride in to shore. I tried again to touch them, but they moved away. Maybe they knew the channel swimming rules. They stayed with us for about half an hour an
d then swam on.

  The waves had grown to nine feet high. The wind, funneled into the pass between the North and South Islands, was roaring through the strait, moving at gale force and gusting up to forty-five knots. Now, though, the waves were behind us. We were surfing mid-channel as the Beach Boys’ song “Catch a Wave” played in my head. I felt as if I were in fact sitting on top of the world as we rode one wave after the other, surfing toward the South Island.

  As we moved into the lee of the land, the waves flattened to two feet, the wind continued to gust, and a rip current grabbed us. Once again, it started pushing us back out into the strait. Sonnichsen and the crew cheered me on, and Cataldo and Sonnichsen conferred. Cataldo had the crew call up a friend, a fellow fisherman who lived on the South Island. The friend had positioned his boat near shore, and he was giving Cataldo minute-by-minute updates about the tides and currents, helping him select a landing spot. Cataldo asked if he could check with others in the fishing fleet, to gather more information and make the best decision, but the weather was so poor that none of them dared leave the harbor.

  Somehow, realizing that once again I had hit a brick wall, the dolphins reappeared. A dozen or so this time, they moved in closer to me and let me ride their slipstreams. We quickly cut across the rip, and then they disappeared.

  As the sun began to set behind the South Island, ten dolphins swam over to the paddlers and me, in a tight formation. Their voices were higher pitched now, their squeaks more frequent, and they were no longer chattering happily. It was as if they had become very serious.

  When we got to within a half mile from shore, the sun set and the dolphins moved in closer, as if to protect us. This was the area Cataldo was worried about. Here the ocean floor dropped and the Antarctic Current welled up. The water suddenly dropped to fifty-four degrees and took my breath away. It wasn’t the cold, though, that was the real danger. With this current change came an increase in plant and animal life. Cataldo knew this was a favorite feeding area for large predatory sharks.

  We were five hundred yards from shore and had a choice of entering one bay or the other. Cataldo chose the one to the left; it was about a hundred yards closer. The dolphins turned to the right. I turned left to follow Cataldo. The dolphins began chattering excitedly moving erratically. Within a moment I knew why the dolphins had turned the other way; there was a current to the left, one I didn’t have the energy to cross.

  Cataldo and I turned right, following the dolphins. Here the current was sweeping north, and Cataldo urged me to hurry. If I didn’t, I would be swept out of Picton Sound. But the dolphins were inches from my fingers, and I knew they were guiding us in to shore. As I grabbed long strands of thick, brown bull kelp and pulled myself onto some rocks to clear the water, I heard the dolphins and crew chattering and cheering. We had made it across Cook Strait. In twelve hours and two and a half minutes, we had completed the crossing, with the help of so many from New Zealand, and I became the first woman to make that swim. It was the roughest swim I had ever finished.

  After I climbed down from the rocks and slid back into the sea, Cataldo again told me to hurry. I thought he was joking, but he was adamant. Once he conveyed why he was concerned—he was afraid a shark would attack me, especially in this bay, where sharks frequently fed—I sprinted to the boat. He and Robbie quickly helped me into the skiff.

  That evening we motored back to the North Island through gale-force winds. At one point, our boats nearly sank from taking on so much water, but I had no idea; I was asleep. Church bells had rung throughout the country when we’d finished the swim, and the following day at noon, church bells once again rang at the same time, to celebrate the crossing.

  More than anything I now understood that no one achieves great goals alone. It didn’t matter to New Zealanders that I wasn’t from their country. It only mattered that I was trying to swim their strait. They had cheered me on for hours, and in doing so, they had cheered the same human spirit within themselves. Through the Cook Strait crossing, I realized that a swim can be far more than an athletic adventure. It can become a way to bridge the distance between peoples and nations. During the Cook Strait swim, we were united in a human endurance struggle that surpassed national borders.

  11

  Human Research Subject

  Despite traveling to the far-off reaches of the world, taking on challenges, I actually had a very normal life. After graduating from high school, I was admitted to the University of California, Santa Barbara. When I arrived there, I knew my focus would be on my studies.

  As in high school, I decided to join the women’s swim team and water polo team. This would give me a sense of stability and belonging, and it would be a way to have fun and train for other goals outside the pool. After Cook Strait my father had pulled out a map of the world. He knew that once again I was searching for what to do next; I really wanted to do something more, but I wasn’t sure what it was.

  He pointed to the Bering Strait. There were two islands in the center of the strait: one on the American side, called Little Diomede, and the other, Big Diomede, in the Soviet Union. In a straight line, the distance between the two islands—from the United States to the Soviet Union—was only 2.7 miles.

  My first thought was, There have got to be icebergs in those waters; there’s no way I could do that. But my father suggested that I do some research to find out more about the area and, if it looked like a swim was possible, start contacting officials to get a visa to the Soviet Union. Obtaining permission to land in the Soviet Union didn’t seem very likely. It was fall of 1975 and the United States and the Soviet Union were in the midst of the Cold War, locked in a power struggle, distrusting and fearful that the other would start a nuclear war. But as early as age sixteen, I’d known that one of my life’s goals was to make a positive difference in the world. I wanted to somehow make it count, to do more than just live a life from day to day. So I began to think about how this swim could be done. I wrote letters to the Alaska Fish and Game Department to find out information about water temperatures in the Bering Strait, and I wrote to my local congressman, Jerry Patterson, asking if he could contact the Soviets for me for a visa.

  Meanwhile, I began college, and in May 1976 Dave volunteered to travel to Alaska to investigate the Bering Strait. Naively we thought that if he gathered enough information that spring, in the summer of 1976 I could make an attempt.

  When Dave called us from Wales, Alaska, on the radiophone, he sounded like he was calling from Mars.

  On the map, Wales looked nearly as remote. It was a small Inuit village of perhaps 150 people, about an hour’s flight north of Nome. Dave’s voice was filled with excitement. He had flown from Nome to Wales in a small plane, and they’d landed in a blizzard. By dogsled, the chief magistrate had taken him home and offered to let him stay with his family and to help him. When Dave had explained the reason for his trip—his younger sister wanted to swim across the Bering Strait—the chief magistrate thought he was either joking or just crazy. It was the middle of May, and the Bering Strait was frozen from the mainland of Alaska to Siberia. The strait could be ice-clogged until mid-July

  The chief magistrate in the village told Dave there had once been a natural land bridge between the two continents and that about fifteen hundred years ago, his ancestors had probably walked across. The water had risen over the centuries and the bridge was submerged. Swimming the Bering Strait was not possible: the water was far too cold; no one survived. More to the point, the villagers did not trust the Soviets. They had removed some of the villagers’ family members from Big Diomede and several of them had been put in prison camps in Siberia. The villagers didn’t want to have anything to do with the Soviets.

  Dave decided to travel to Tin City, an air force base—a concrete blockhouse north of Wales—set up as a distant early-warning station for tracking Soviet aircraft and missiles. It took a big effort on Dave’s part to convince the officer that he was seriously trying to gather information for a swim.
The officer told Dave the idea was not possible—most people die within twenty minutes of falling into the water—but it was also militarily and politically dangerous.

  While there had been brief periods of thaw in the Cold War, in 1976 there was a lingering chill in the air. Mutual distrust had escalated over our granting the Soviets most-favored-nation trade status contingent upon their increasing the quota of Soviet Jews allowed to emigrate to Israel. Neither side would accommodate the other, and tensions were rising between the two superpowers. While most people thought of U.S.-Soviet relations in terms of Washington and Moscow, two capitals five thousand miles apart, Tin City was less than one hundred miles from Siberia. This was the front line of the Cold War.

  Sporadic incidents had also been occurring along the Bering Sea border—incidents that didn’t make the evening news. The United States and Soviet armed forces were playing war games, finding where they could breach the border as a way of testing their respective security systems and response times. Given the current political situation, the officer doubted that the Soviets would permit anyone to enter their waters.

  Even more significantly, Big Diomede Island, in the Soviet Union, the place I wanted to swim to, was a listening post—a military installation equipped with sophisticated devices that monitored our ships’ and submarines’ movements in the Bering Strait and beyond, as well as a state-of-the-art tracking system for spying on our aircraft and missiles. It was unlikely that the Soviets would allow any American to land on their spy island.

  Meanwhile, we pondered the logistics anyway. The Bering Strait usually thawed by July. The water temperatures were between thirty and forty degrees, and after the thaw, the only way to reach Little Diomede from Wales was by helicopter. We now had something to go on. But the question was: How could I ever prepare to swim in water that cold?

  Anne Loucks, a UCSB swim-team friend of mine who was a physiology student, asked if I would be willing to be a research subject. Annie was doing research on campus at the Institute of Environmental Stress, with Dr. Barbara Drinkwater and Dr. William McCafferty Dr. Drinkwater was one of the most respected research physiologists in the world. She had done pioneering work on women’s physiology. Dr. McCafferty was working on postdoctoral studies on the way surfers acclimate to the cold.