Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [32]
He pointed at Cape Gris-Nez again. “If you swim from France to England, you can face the current when you are fresh, and you may even be able to use it to your advantage. Also, if you look at the English coast, you can see how even it is—there are no big projections like you see with the coast of France, so the currents along shore aren’t as strong, and you have a large landing area. If you miss Dover, you really have the whole British coast upon which to land.
“You also have to consider the record. If you swim from England to France, you have to break a faster time than if you go in the other direction. Let me get out my book and check the time. It was set by a Canadian named Helge Jensen twelve years ago. I was his pilot. His time was ten hours and twenty-three minutes. That record’s stood for twelve years. Corrie Ebbelaar, a Dutch swimmer, set the women’s world record. Her time was ten hours and forty-three minutes. Since you’re going for the record,” Brickell said, “you may want to swim from France to England.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging or anything, but I just want to do the fastest time. That’s really my goal. Mr. Brickell, which direction do you recommend?”
He gave it some thought and said, “I think it would be better for you to swim from England to France. That way you can start out fresh, you don’t have to worry about getting seasick in a boat traveling to France, and you don’t have to spend a lot of time waiting around there. Also I think you’re strong enough to break through the current off Cape Gris-Nez if it’s running fast on the day you swim, and I think it would be a feather in our cap if you could do the fastest time.”
In order to select the best weather conditions, Brickell monitored the weather every night when out in the Channel fishing. He also watched the weather forecast on television every afternoon. He didn’t say this, but I gathered from talking to him that he was an expert at both selecting the best day and piloting for a swimmer. He took pride in what he did. And he had honed his skills until he was the best. He had taken the greatest number of world-record-breaking swimmers across the English Channel, but he said he had never taken a swimmer who was so young who wanted to break the world record. That intrigued him, and I could tell by that flicker of light in his blue eyes that he was very interested in working with me. He never said it, because he was very humble, but he knew better than anyone how important a role the pilot played in getting a swimmer across the Channel. With an ordinary pilot, all that could be expected was an ordinary swim. Pilot and swimmer work in many ways like a mountain climber climbing Mount Everest and a Sherpa; one could not succeed without the technical ability of the other. Brickell believed he had the knowledge and expertise to get me across in world-record time if I could swim fast enough, and he understood that he would have to draw on everything he knew to give me that opportunity. He loved that challenge, and he made it clear that he wanted to pilot me.
We stepped outside his home and he showed us the Helen Anne Marie 137, his forty-five-foot-long fishing boat, anchored in Dover Harbour. It was an old boat, and its chains and lines were rusted, but it had been freshly painted and was clean and inviting. He would have taken us on board, but the tide was out and the boat was too low in the harbor for us to climb aboard. The Helen Anne Marie had a wet stack. This wasn’t good; it meant that engine fumes were released into the water. The fumes could make a swimmer sick or cause headaches. The exhaust area was on the left