Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [106]
When I arrived in Anchorage in mid-June, Jeff Berliner, a reporter from UPI, met me at Dr. Nyboer’s office to interview me. After an hour, he put down his paper and pencil, scratched his head, and said, “So you mean to say you don’t have Soviet permission, you don’t have escort boats, you don’t know how cold the water is, and you don’t have sponsorship, but you think you can do it?” My reply was confident. “Yes, I think I can,” I said, and a sudden surge of excitement filled the room. It was electric. Berliner shifted forward in his chair and said, “Gorbachev has been talking about glasnost, a new openness between the United States and Soviet Union. Do you think he is aware of you and this project?”
“I sure hope he is—I’ve written to him at least four times,” I said.
“If Gorbachev approves of this swim, this action could signal a new relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union,” Berliner said. Contemplating the depth of his statement, he shook his head and hurried off to file his story.
As he rounded the corner, I was overwhelmed by his questions. In all my planning I hadn’t looked at all of the challenges piled one on top of another, as he had presented them to me. Instead, I had kept everything horizontal, dealing with each challenge one at a time. When he’d asked me if I thought I could do it, I’d had to say yes, because otherwise there would be no point whatsoever in going through all that I had so far. But I still wasn’t sure how it was going to happen. I just continued believing that it could.
In Nome, Dennis Campion, Dr. Nyboer’s friend, met me at the airport, drove me along the main dirt road to his home, and showed me to the guest room. He immediately made me feel welcome. A large Irishman with dark eyes, dark hair, and a rumbling laugh, Campion was an amazing person. He had traveled the world as a dredger, using special equipment to remove silt from harbors, canals, and, in this case, the gold mines around Nome. Campion had a nautical chart of the Bering Strait, and the day that I arrived at his home, he spread it out on the kitchen table. He was so excited about the swim, and he provided me with some valuable information. As a dredger he was well versed in reading nautical charts, especially in looking at changes in the ocean floor. He pointed out a deep trench immediately off Big Diomede. He said that there was a strong current immediately offshore and it was cutting away at the ocean floor. In summer the prevailing current flow was from south to north; in winter it flowed from north to south, bringing with it pack ice. Campion suggested that I start at the very southern tip of Little Diomede and compensate for the strong current flowing north. In calm water the current between Big and Little Diomede Islands ranged from half a knot to one knot. That meant that I would have to crab against the current, go sideways into it, always angling to the left. I had to do this: Big Diomede was only four miles long, and if I missed the island, I would end up in the Chukchi Sea. There would be no way to turn back and fight the current. The current was too strong, but more than that, the water was even colder there than in the Bering Strait.
That same afternoon I received a phone call from David Karp, from the Nome Visitors and Travelers Bureau. He had contacted Evergreen Helicopters, and they said that they might be able to help with transportation for the swim if we were willing to fly out with the mail. Otherwise we would have to charter the helicopter, and that would be a minimum of five thousand dollars per flight. Flying out with the mail sounded like a great option, since I couldn’t afford chartering the helicopter.
A day after I arrived in Nome, I met with David Karp at the visitors bureau and set his office up as the place to take calls from reporters and from my brain-trust team. After I finished making the calls, a man named Larry Maine introduced himself. He knew David Karp and said that he was a fisherman from Petersburg,