Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [54]
The wind was down, the sea was calmly reflecting the heavens, and I was swimming very strongly, gliding with each stroke, like a skater sliding across the ice. Everything seemed to be just right.
After four hours of swimming, fog began slowly drifting into the channel. Clouds connected into long bands so that at times the lead boat was completely obscured. It made me feel a little uneasy, and Stockwell and Johnson, in the dory, felt that way too. Stockwell got on the walkie-talkie and suggested that Mickey move the Bandito closer.
It took him just a couple of minutes to turn the Bandito around, but the fog had become so thick that we couldn’t see him at all. Instinctively I moved closer to Pat, on the paddleboard. Stockwell continued talking on the walkie-talkie, giving Mickey our compass heading. When I turned my head to breathe, the dory suddenly disappeared into the fog. Pat and I tried calling to Stockwell and Johnson, but they couldn’t hear us. Pat pulled the flashlight off his paddle-board and shone it into the clouds. To our horror, the light only reflected back at us. There was no way anyone anywhere would see it, except for us. At that moment it became very clear that we were lost in the fog, in the middle of the night, in the center of the Catalina Channel.
Foghorns bellowed around us, their deep voices coming from all different directions and distances; some were louder, others softer, punctuating the darkness with deep, rumbling moans. And as the fog descended into the channel, the moaning grew louder and more frequent, until we were encircled by phantom voices, so that we became disoriented by the sounds.
A few minutes earlier I had seen light beams from a lighthouse somewhere out there, but the flashes had dimmed, and now there was nothing at all. I was doing everything I could to remain calm, to be optimistic, until the bow waves from the tankers and freighters started hitting us. They came out of nowhere, and some were ten or twelve feet high. We could hear the ships’ horns blaring, sending out warnings; they were so close they hurt our ears. But there was nothing we could do. There would be a pause between the warning and the wave, and then suddenly we’d be lifted up off the surface of the earth, it seemed, into the clouds. Scrambling to stay beside Pat, I’d fight back the feeling of panic. I was so afraid that I would lose Pat on a wave in the black fog or be crushed by a tanker. The tanker waves kept hitting us from different directions, so it was hard to tell which way to move, where to go so we wouldn’t be run over. We tried to move in one direction only to be hit by another set of waves. Then Pat got caught on the crest of a wave; he was lifted into the fog, and I was in the trough, so I couldn’t see him or the board. On the verge of panic, he shouted to me at the top of his lungs, though his voice was muffled by the clouds: “Stay with me. I’m here. Right here. Move this way.”
The wave lifted me up and I looked down into the black cloud, terrified beyond anything ever before. “I’m here. Right here,” I said, feeling my fear rise as the wave lifted me higher, straining to see him through the black drape of fog. There was nothing that I could use as a reference point, nothing to connect me to earth—no lights on the water, no moonlight, no starlight, nothing. Everything had been smothered by fog. Even my breaths were short and labored. I felt like I was trying to breathe through a cold, wet towel.
Pat was somewhere down there, in the wave trough, still shouting, although I couldn’t make out his words anymore. The clarity was gone—all I could hear were muffled sounds. Then I heard a ship’s engine. It was deep, close. Putting my head well into a wave, I listened intently for the engine sounds,