Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [82]
It was the fastest four hundred yards I ever swam. The cheering crowd pressed in around me, and someone threw a towel around my shoulders. I excused myself; I had to see what had happened to Doug.
Alex and Sonnichsen jumped off the Zodiac and hugged me. They were blocking my view. “What happened to Doug?” I asked.
“He’s over there.” Alex pointed. “I’ll let him tell you the story.”
Doug was standing in ankle-deep water straightening his spear. He said, “A twelve-foot bronze whaler shark came up out of the kelp for you. He had his mouth all the way open and I knew he was going to attack, so I went down and shot him. I hit his dorsal fin, and the shark bit the spear, bent it in half, and pulled it out of his side. Then he swam off. The blood from his wound attracted others. That’s why the crew had you sprint in to shore.”
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Sure. It’s quite a good thing that the wind was blowing from the northeast, though. It only blows from that direction one percent of the year. If it had been blowing the normal way, the water would have been turbid, and I wouldn’t have seen the shark,” Doug said, and smiled, rightly proud of himself.
Yes, we had been lucky, I thought, and remembered the old Zulu fisherman who had given me his blessing.
I returned to UCSB to complete my junior year of college. That winter I received a letter from Sandy Blewett, the swimmer I had met a few years before in England, the one who had helped me on the Cook Strait swim. Sandy was planning to attempt a crossing of the English Channel. The year before I had coached her to swim the Catalina Channel. She had been successful and now, with more confidence and training, she asked me if I would coach her for the English Channel.
That summer, my brother, Dave, and I had been training off the California coast with David Yudovin. We had met Yudovin in 1976, when he wanted to swim across the Catalina Channel. He had asked Dave to coach him, and he was successful on the Catalina swim. We had all become good friends, and in following summers Yudovin and I trained together in the ocean off Seal Beach.
Yudovin and I had planned to swim across the Santa Barbara Channel together from Anacapa Island to Ventura, California; the distance was ten miles in a straight line. We had wanted to make the swim during the fall of 1977, but the weather never cooperated. After that our schedules hadn’t meshed, and I’d finally lost interest. Yudovin had decided to continue waiting and had gotten John Sonnichsen to agree to accompany him in the boat, and I decided to help Sandy Blewett, to return the favor she had done for me. I was very excited about working with her again.
We met in Dover, England, in May 1979, and I watched Sandy swim; she looked really good. After her workout, we walked along the pebbles of Dover Harbour and talked. The air off the North Sea was fresh and sweet, and the sky was brilliant blue. Warm late-afternoon sun cascaded over the white cliffs, giving them a halo of gold. I thought of Fahmy and was glad to be back in Dover again.
As we walked along the harbor, we saw six swimmers moving between the pier and the Hovercraft port. The coach standing on the beach looked familiar. He looked like Monir. Five years had passed since I’d seen him in Egypt. I had met other men, but none of them had ever impressed me the way he had. We had written off and on, but gradually we had stopped writing. Our lives, it seemed, had gone on. But I often thought of him and wondered how he was doing.
This man seemed taller from the back, more muscular. Slowing my pace, I studied him. He must have felt my presence, because he started to turn; I held my breath. It was him, really him.
“Somehow I just knew you would be here this year,” he said, and smiled. His voice was deeper, his face more mature, but the brightness in his eyes was still there.
I wanted to throw my arms around him and give him a big hug,