Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [70]
One day the two sons donned their wet suits and swam out into the strait with me so they could show me shipwrecks along the shore. In a mile’s area there were perhaps fifty shipwrecks, some fairly recent, others hundreds of years old. It was like swimming over liquid history, fascinating and yet eerie; we were passing over a graveyard of ships that had traveled from the far reaches of the world, from Italy, Portugal, Britain, and Spain.
After two weeks of training I was able to stay in forty-four-degree water for up to two hours. One of my most difficult training sessions was on Christmas Day. It was the first time I had ever been away from my family at Christmas, and although I enjoyed being with families in Chile, I realized how very far I was from home.
During that workout on Christmas Day the sky suddenly went black, as it had that day in New Hampshire when I was nine years old and swimming in the pool alone. This time, though, the Fernandez brothers and a small group of locals and tourists from England walked alongside me during the wild and pounding hailstorm. Once the storm subsided, they were joyful at having done something so strange and different, something all of us would remember for our entire lives.
Unfortunately, the stormy weather continued through the next day. But on December 27, the Chilean navy, which had volunteered to provide assistance for the swim, informed us that it was time to travel by bus to what is known as the First Narrows. This is the passage, at one point only a mile and a half wide, that Magellan had discovered when sailing from the Atlantic Ocean through to the Pacific Ocean.
When we reached the First Narrows, we waited for the Chilean navy ship the Elicura to land and drop its ramp onshore so we could walk aboard. As we watched Captain Furniss attempt to land, we held our breath. The tide was racing into the strait from the Atlantic at seven knots, moving like a flooding river. Two hundred meters offshore, the current caught the Elicura and spun it around as if it were a toy boat. Alarms on board sounded, as men scrambled around deck. The ship was about to run aground.
Quickly, Captain Furniss ordered his wheelman to steer offshore, but the ship wasn’t responding. The captain ordered more power to the engines, and a deep rumble vibrated the air and beach. The ship still didn’t move.
John pointed. “Look at the stern. See all the brown water? The propeller’s in too close, and they’re churning up sand. He’s in trouble.”
Hoping that they could ride the current to a point where it diminished and then cut across it, the captain ordered his wheelman to parallel the shore. There was only a small margin for error, and a delay between when the captain gave the order and how quickly the ship responded. Fearing he would run aground in those moments, we held our breath. The ship seemed to teeter in the current between the sea and the shore. Fortunately, the captain made the right call. As he anticipated, the current slackened, and he quickly ordered his wheelman to turn offshore.
Watching this was terribly sobering. If a ship can’t land in that current, what’s it going to be like trying to swim across it? I wondered with a sense of dread. After that attempted landing, John and I thought the swim would have to be postponed for the day. But the captain wasn’t ready to give up. He made a second attempt to pick us up, this time allowing for more time to turn the stern in to shore so they could drop the ramp. But once again the current whipped the ship around and tossed it precariously within a couple hundred meters of shore. This time Captain Furniss reacted sooner, increasing the ship’s speed and pulling offshore. Then he immediately ordered the crew to lower a Zodiac inflatable rubber boat