Swimming to Antarctica (19 page)

The wave was tumbling, rolling forward, pulling me up, as if I were drawn by some invisible string, then bending me backward. I didn’t want to go backward over the falls. Pulling as hard as I could, I tried to go deeper. My lungs were burning. I wanted to come up for air, but I couldn’t. Another wave was breaking, one after the other in successive concussions. They were too large to swim through.

At last there was a gap in the set. Fighting up through the foam, I gasped for air and looked around. Doug was to my right; he told me to sprint out farther before the next set hit. I couldn’t see Mario, and neither could Doug. A minute passed, maybe two; we tried to see over the backs of the waves, but they were too high. We discussed the possibility of going back in to shore to find him. Doug said it was too dangerous.

Finally, maybe a couple of minutes later, the waves subsided and we saw the journalists pulling Mario out of the surf. He was standing up, but his mask was down around his neck, and his flippers were off. He waved for us to go on without him.

Together, Doug and I kicked offshore. With a spear gun in one hand, Doug was unable to swim and he was unable to see what was below us. I wondered if he felt as much of a target as I did.

There was no sign of the Zodiac, so we decided to keep going. The water was lapis blue, clear, and felt thick with current. Warm sun shone on our backs, and puffy white clouds cast dark shadows on the
water. Still there was no sign of the Zodiac, so we turned parallel to the coast and headed south, toward Cape Point.

The current twisted and turned around us, and we moved through pockets of shocking cold and warm. Finally, in the distance we saw Alex and Sonnichsen in the Zodiac and the ski boat just behind them.

Tired from kicking so far, Doug climbed into the ski boat while another diver jumped into the water, grabbed a rope tied to the boat, and held on. We started moving together; then something large bumped me on my right side. Sharks always bump their victims before they bite them, the old fisherman told me, and so I thought it was a shark and nearly jumped out of my skin. But it was the Zodiac. The wind was flowing across the Zodiac’s bow, making it difficult to keep the boat moving in a straight line.

We rounded Cape Point and watched the lighthouse on the cliffs at the very tip slide to our left. We were now a mile from shore, and I watched the breaking waves outline the golden African continent with a line of white.

Quickly we reached the line of foam where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans converged. Here the water boiled with current. We changed course three or four times to find our way through the current, and it took us nearly an hour to round the point. Soon, though, we were six miles from Buffels Bay. But the wind was beginning to increase. It was gusting up to thirty-five knots, a short, rapid, hard-to-find-a-place-to-breathe chop. I was ticked off at the wind. It wasn’t supposed to be blowing, and it wasn’t supposed to be blowing from this direction.

Clouds passed across the sun and turned off the sunlight like a light switch. It was now impossible to see anything below. The divers changed position again. And then something rammed me. I jumped and looked over. It was the Zodiac again. In the wind and chop, Alex was fighting to maintain control and I was fighting to control my emotions.

As we moved into the Indian Ocean, the water warmed up to seventy-two degrees, and it was clear and turquoise blue. Long strands of kelp that looked like mermaids’ hair gently rolled in and out with
the small waves. Brightly colored fish swam beneath us, and for the first time I began to relax, stretch my strokes out, and enjoy the swim.

Doug’s voice snapped me back to reality. “Lynne, see the debris over there? That’s where the yellow-bellied sea snakes congregate. You’ve got to move offshore.”

It didn’t take me more than a moment to react. I quickly swam back into the current flow, where waves slapped me in the face, but I didn’t care; we were just four hundred yards from shore and I could see two wild ostriches and a crowd of cheering South Africans. It was all downhill now.

Turning to my left to breathe and to see how Doug was doing, I suddenly stopped. “Where’s Doug?” I shouted, looking down into the water. He wasn’t hanging on to the rope.
Oh my God, where’s Doug?
I wondered. I didn’t see a shark.

The crew hadn’t heard me, so I shouted again, above the wind: “Where’s Doug?”

Alex pulled the Zodiac close to me, then looked down. “Go on. Go on! Sprint for shore!” he shouted.

I wasn’t just going to leave Doug. I looked down again. I couldn’t see him. What happened to him? Was he okay? Alex and John were shouting at me to go, insisting that they had the situation under control.

I started sprinting. I was scared for Doug, and for myself. My fear increased with each moment; without any shark spotters, I was really afraid of being attacked. Glancing back over my shoulder I could see both crews leaning over the sides of their boats and staring into the water.

It was the fastest four hundred yards I ever swam. The cheering crowd pressed in around me, and someone threw a towel around my shoulders. I excused myself; I had to see what had happened to Doug.

Alex and Sonnichsen jumped off the Zodiac and hugged me. They were blocking my view. “What happened to Doug?” I asked.

“He’s over there.” Alex pointed. “I’ll let him tell you the story.”

Doug was standing in ankle-deep water straightening his spear. He said, “A twelve-foot bronze whaler shark came up out of the kelp
for you. He had his mouth all the way open and I knew he was going to attack, so I went down and shot him. I hit his dorsal fin, and the shark bit the spear, bent it in half, and pulled it out of his side. Then he swam off. The blood from his wound attracted others. That’s why the crew had you sprint in to shore.”

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Sure. It’s quite a good thing that the wind was blowing from the northeast, though. It only blows from that direction one percent of the year. If it had been blowing the normal way, the water would have been turbid, and I wouldn’t have seen the shark,” Doug said, and smiled, rightly proud of himself.

Yes, we had been lucky, I thought, and remembered the old Zulu fisherman who had given me his blessing.

I returned to UCSB to complete my junior year of college. That winter I received a letter from Sandy Blewett, the swimmer I had met a few years before in England, the one who had helped me on the Cook Strait swim. Sandy was planning to attempt a crossing of the English Channel. The year before I had coached her to swim the Catalina Channel. She had been successful and now, with more confidence and training, she asked me if I would coach her for the English Channel.

That summer, my brother, Dave, and I had been training off the California coast with David Yudovin. We had met Yudovin in 1976, when he wanted to swim across the Catalina Channel. He had asked Dave to coach him, and he was successful on the Catalina swim. We had all become good friends, and in following summers Yudovin and I trained together in the ocean off Seal Beach.

Yudovin and I had planned to swim across the Santa Barbara Channel together from Anacapa Island to Ventura, California; the distance was ten miles in a straight line. We had wanted to make the swim during the fall of 1977, but the weather never cooperated. After that our schedules hadn’t meshed, and I’d finally lost interest. Yudovin had decided to continue waiting and had gotten John Sonnichsen to
agree to accompany him in the boat, and I decided to help Sandy Blewett, to return the favor she had done for me. I was very excited about working with her again.

We met in Dover, England, in May 1979, and I watched Sandy swim; she looked really good. After her workout, we walked along the pebbles of Dover Harbour and talked. The air off the North Sea was fresh and sweet, and the sky was brilliant blue. Warm late-afternoon sun cascaded over the white cliffs, giving them a halo of gold. I thought of Fahmy and was glad to be back in Dover again.

As we walked along the harbor, we saw six swimmers moving between the pier and the Hovercraft port. The coach standing on the beach looked familiar. He looked like Monir. Five years had passed since I’d seen him in Egypt. I had met other men, but none of them had ever impressed me the way he had. We had written off and on, but gradually we had stopped writing. Our lives, it seemed, had gone on. But I often thought of him and wondered how he was doing.

This man seemed taller from the back, more muscular. Slowing my pace, I studied him. He must have felt my presence, because he started to turn; I held my breath. It was him, really him.

“Somehow I just knew you would be here this year,” he said, and smiled. His voice was deeper, his face more mature, but the brightness in his eyes was still there.

I wanted to throw my arms around him and give him a big hug, but I couldn’t; it wouldn’t have been proper with the other swimmers there. In Egypt, people didn’t simply hug one another. So I extended my hand, and he took it; my eyes never left his. We both smiled. It was so good to see him.

He had to finish giving the team their workout. I waited, while Sandy said she wanted to go back and take a shower and get warm.

It was simply good to stand beside him and watch him coach. I could tell that his team loved and respected him just as much as I’d loved my past coaches. It was a wonderful thing to see.

When the workout was over and the team went back to the hotel, Monir and I stayed on the beach to talk.

He had traveled to England the year before to try to break my record but had missed it by twenty minutes.

He had thought I would return when my time was broken, to try to recapture the record. But I told him that I had helped coach the woman who had beaten my time, and that swimming the English Channel no longer had a great appeal for me; I had other things I wanted to do, things that had never been done before. But I was really sorry that he had not broken my record. It was very difficult to have that goal and not fulfill it. In the summer of 1975, Dave had attempted the English Channel. He was successful on the swim, but he didn’t break the record and he was very disappointed. I thought that was sad; it seemed so much out of perspective to train so hard, to have such a high goal, and then to discount it all because you didn’t break the record. There was still a great challenge in just completing the swim. Channel swimming was so different from pool swimming. So much could change in the space of eight hours. Monir laughed hard at that; he remembered that this was what I’d said to him just before we’d swum in the Nile race.

So much had happened in our lives, but it was simply wonderful to be there with him. Time had changed things, and he had changed too; but the core of him was the same, and I knew I was attracted to him more than ever before. I don’t know what signaled it, but he suddenly reached out to hug me, and we kissed. From the look on his face, he felt the same way I did. I’d never experienced anything like this before. We held hands and talked about what we had been doing, and then we had to leave to take care of our swimmers.

When I saw Monir the next morning, my feelings for him were so strong that I decided I had to avoid him or see him only when someone else was around. My responsibility, I told myself, was to be there for Sandy; she was my priority. After we finished coaching I met him again on the beach. I had never been drawn to someone that strongly. It surprised me. We kissed again, almost as if to confirm our feelings, and it happened again, that electrical charge.

A few days later Sandy started her swim from England to France. The weather was good, and she was well prepared. But seven miles from the French coast she became disoriented; shivering, she disqualified herself by touching the boat. That evening, we discussed what had happened and we decided that she had simply psyched herself
out. She had stopped in the exact same place the year before, just within sight of the French coast. I suggested that she take some time to collect her thoughts, rest up, wait until the following year, and then make another attempt. I promised I would be back to help her.

For the next couple of weeks I explored France and Switzerland. After I swam across Lake Geneva, I called Sandy to find out how she was doing.

She didn’t sound very good. Less than a week after her attempt she had tried again. She had gotten within seven miles of the French shore and had passed out. Having been through a similar situation before in the Nile River, I tried to help her evaluate her swim. She decided to stay in England and train and attempt the Channel again the following year.

Then I called home to check on David Yudovin, who had attempted to swim from Anacapa Island to the mainland. He had gotten within four hundred yards from shore and then gone into complete cardiac arrest. Fortunately, the coast guard had been nearby, and an emergency crew had raced him to an ambulance and then to the hospital. It had taken doctors more than an hour to get his heart beating again. He had pneumonia, cracked ribs, and was in the hospital in Ventura. I had to get home.

I stopped off in Dover on the way back from Europe and said good-bye to Monir. I had hoped to see him for a few days before I left England, but it was probably a good thing that I didn’t get romantically involved. With Yudovin in the hospital, I knew I had to get home and see him. When I reached London, Dr. William Keatinge met me and had me stay at his and his wife’s home. A physician and a physiologist at the University of London, Dr. Keatinge was also a friend of Dr. McCafferty’s at UCSB. He and I had met at UCSB, and I had started corresponding with him to find out more about the human body’s responses to cold.

Most of the evening we talked about his research, my swims, and Yudovin’s condition. In the morning, Dr. Keatinge took me to Heathrow Airport. Unfortunately, the airline I was taking home was overbooked by hundreds of people, so for four days I had to sleep in
an alley with two hundred other people outside the Pan Am terminal. All in all, it was a good experience. It gave me a small sense of what it would be like to have to live on the streets, and it also showed me how situations like that can bring out the best in people. Everyone shared what they had, and told stories about their families and their homeland.