Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [61]
“Those are the scouts. They’re having a good look at us,” Cataldo shouted. He was laughing, knowing what was going to happen next.
Moments later the sea was filled with the voices of dolphins chattering, squeaking, clicking, whistling, calling. Their voices were fast and excited. Pods of dolphins arrived. There were twenty, then thirty, and when I looked down through the crystal-clear water, I saw dolphins below, and dolphins below them, and yet more dolphins. They were threading their way between one another, moving in close, rotating onto their sides so they could look up and see us better. It seemed as if they were happy, as if they somehow knew we needed them. It was inspiring. Maybe they were the answer to my prayer.
In unison, two dolphins swimming snout to snout rolled over and gazed up at me. They held that position on their sides for maybe an entire minute, as if they were checking me out. They were clicking and whistling back and forth, communicating with each other and with others nearby. When they rolled back over, I wanted to reach down and just touch them. Extending my arm, I tried to get closer, but they maintained a distance of at least a couple of arm’s lengths. The wind died slightly, too, and the sea grew flatter.
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