Swimming to Antarctica (15 page)

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 and 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.

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.

The research team was doing physiological studies on body type and athletic performance, as well as acclimatization to cold. They had just completed a series of tests on Jacqueline Hansen, the women’s world-record holder in the marathon, and they wanted to run some comparison tests on me.

Dr. Drinkwater suspected that because of my background in long-distance cold-water swimming, I might somehow respond differently to the cold than the average person. She explained that when most people enter a cold environment without adequate clothing, they eventually go into hypothermia—their internal, or “core,” temperature drops. Cold water leaches the heat from the body twenty-five to thirty times faster than cold air. People keep their bodies warm through a variety of defense mechanisms. As a first line of defense, the body narrows the blood vessels under the skin, forcing warm blood into the brain and the core of the body to protect the vital organs. Also, the skin temperature drops to reflect the surrounding environment. Second, the body attempts to generate heat by shivering. If the body temperature drops too low, the cold blood becomes acidic from lack of oxygen. This results in arrhythmia; the heart doesn’t beat effectively, and cardiac arrest can occur.

From the onset, Dr. Drinkwater explained that by participating in these studies I could help them better understand how the human body functioned. It could help them figure out basic human responses to the cold, and maybe increase people’s survival rates. It
was also basic research and what they discovered might not be directly applicable for years. Dr. Drinkwater also told me that whatever they learned, they would share with me, so that I would be able to better understand what my body was doing on my long swims. I was excited about participating, and a little scared, but I agreed to be part of the study.

The scientists began by running a number of underwater weighing tests to determine my percentage of body fat. Healthy men have a low percentage of body fat, and that fat is usually distributed around the abdomen. This generally makes them negatively buoyant, which means they tend to sink. Most women, on the other hand, have a higher percentage of body fat that is well distributed throughout their bodies, making them positively buoyant, which means they float.

Dr. Drinkwater told me, “You’re different. You have neutral buoyancy. That means your body density is exactly the same as seawater. Your proportion of fat to muscle is perfectly balanced so you don’t float or sink in the water; you’re at one with the water. We’ve never seen anything like this before.”

Her Zen-like finding meant that I didn’t have to use energy to either fight against sinking or pull myself down into the water to counteract buoyancy. This enabled me to swim more efficiently, and it helped me conserve energy—energy that I could use for propelling myself forward.

Researchers began observing my workout sessions along the Santa Barbara coast. In the early morning, just before sunrise, Dr. McCafferty, and sometimes his wife and their small dog, Sunshine, walked along the beach below the university dorms as I swam from Coal Oil Point to the pier and back. Before and after these workouts, I’d hide behind a bush and take my core temperature using a rectal thermometer, the only way to get an accurate reading after immersion in cold water. I always made a point of telling Dr. McCafferty my temperature just as joggers were passing; they’d give him quizzical looks, since it appeared to them that he was talking to the bushes.

Through the course of these observations, as well as countless others, Dr. McCafferty discovered that my body temperature before a workout was usually a degree below what was considered normal. By
the end of a two-hour workout, after swimming in water between fifty and sixty-five degrees, my temperature had risen to a degree or two above normal. Dr. McCafferty explained that the human body has a natural thermostat that strives to keep its temperature at a set point. What my body did was to lower that set point so it didn’t have to work as hard to stay warm. This was all new and exciting information for the scientists and for me.

Dr. Drinkwater and Anne Loucks also made some interesting findings. They were thrilled when they discovered that I reacted completely differently than the average person when I swam in cold water. Most people who swim in fifty-degree water lose body heat more rapidly than they can create it, and so they go into hypothermia in a relatively short amount of time, depending on their conditioning, body fat, and many other factors. But the scientists discovered that I was different. After I’d been swimming for four hours in fifty-degree water, working out at a fast pace, Dr. Drinkwater and Anne Loucks measured my core temperature and found that it was up to 101 degrees. They hypothesized that I was working at such a high rate I was creating more heat than I was losing, I was able to reduce blood flow to my extremities efficiently, and my well-distributed body fat acted like an internal wet suit that kept me warm.

What I decided I needed to do was to swim in water temperatures that would simulate those in the Bering Strait or the Strait of Magellan. It was apparent that obtaining permission for the Bering Strait was not going to happen quickly, so I’d decided to shift my goals and set my sights on the Strait of Magellan. No one had ever attempted this swim. I thought it would be exciting and romantic to attempt a swim across a waterway where ships had difficulty navigating. It seemed like a big challenge, but I also thought that I could collect research information, core-temperature measurements and the like, that might be useful to the doctors.

I asked Dr. Drinkwater and Dr. McCafferty if it might be possible for me to swim in the cold-water research tank at the institute while they gradually lowered the water temperature over a two- to three-week period. Both Dr. Drinkwater and Dr. McCafferty were excited
about the proposal, but when they approached the director of the institute, Dr. Steven Horvath, he said he would not permit it. Dr. Horvath was afraid that I would endanger myself if I attempted swimming the Strait of Magellan, but Dr. Drinkwater and Dr. McCafferty helped me convince him that this was my next goal whether or not I had his support. It would be better, the doctors argued on my behalf, if we got a chance to see what the effects of forty-two-degree water would be like in the lab, in a controlled environment, rather than out in the wilds of the Strait of Magellan. And, the doctors added, they would obtain valuable research data otherwise unattainable.

Dr. Horvath begrudgingly relented, although he didn’t go along with the idea of gradually lowering the water temperature and doing daily studies. He told us he would give me a onetime deal only: the water temperature in the cold tank would be dropped to forty-two degrees, and he would let me swim while being supervised by his research team. A cardiologist and an internist would also be present in case we ran into any problems.

Brigette, the nurse at the Institute of Environmental Stress, led me to a tiny white cubicle and had me take off my sweat-suit jacket. Sitting down facing me, she picked up a piece of fine-grit sandpaper, leaned over, and began sanding my chest as if it were a coarse two-by-four. After rubbing two quarter-sized bright pink spots on my upper chest, she had me take off my swimsuit top so she could sand three more spots around my left breast. The skin there was very tender, and she quickly reached the nerves. I held tightly to the chair arm.

Brigette explained that she needed to sand the skin away to ensure good contact with the EKG leads. An accurate reading was critical. Based on normal responses of human beings, the experiment could put an enormous stress on my heart. No one was sure how I would respond, so the cardiologist present in the lab would be watching the EKG monitor throughout the test.

To prevent water from getting into the EKG circuitry and shorting out the system while I was in the water, Brigette attached twelve long wire leads to the electrodes and then covered the electrodes with
airplane glue and a thin layer of plastic. Then she broke out a fresh piece of sandpaper and lightly sanded my big toes, fingertips, and a couple of spots on my forehead. To these areas she attached thermocouples that held the electrodes on my skin; the electrodes would measure my skin temperature during the experiment. Using waterproof tape, she taped more leads to my big toes, fingers, and forehead. By the time she finished I looked like Medusa.