Swimming to Antarctica_ Tales of a Long-Distance Swimmer - Lynne Cox [88]
That night we celebrated with the people in Myvatn with a wonderful dinner at one of the villagers’ houses.
The next morning we flew back to Reykjavík and met with Petur Bjornsson. He was elated, and he said that what I was doing had reached the hearts of the common people. He said I was now a hero to the Icelandic people, that they would talk of the swim in years to come. I told him that I would always remember them, that no one ever achieves great things alone.
Jeffrey and I continued our journey. With the support of a crew in Gibraltar, I became the first woman to swim across the Strait of Gibraltar, from Morocco to Gibraltar; then, with an Italian support team, I swam across the Strait of Messina. From there Jeffrey and I traveled to Greece, and I swam around Delos Island, then across the Bosporus in Turkey, across Lake Kumming in China, and the five lakes of Mount Fuji in Japan. Each of these presented us with unique challenges and wonderful cultural experiences. But the one swim that would be the most dramatic of all in the around-the-world swim, and the most significant in terms of providing a key to the Bering Strait, was Glacier Bay.
The swim across Lake Myvatn stretched me, forced me to plod on through the cold. More important, I’d learned I could endure forty-three-degree water for nearly two hours. Now the question was, Could I endure intensely colder water for a shorter time? Glacier Bay, Alaska, would give me the answer to this question.
15
Glacier Bay
It took a lot for me to wrap my mind around it, to even begin to believe I could do it. Seeing those pure white and powder-blue icebergs bobbing on Glacier Bay’s waters was enough to make me realize this was going to stretch me further than I’d ever been stretched before. It took a tremendous effort for me to even think that the swim could be possible.
On October 4, 1985, the night before the attempted swim, a sudden cold snap hit Alaska. If Glacier Bay had been filled only with salt water, this wouldn’t have created a problem. But the bay contains sweet freshwater from cascading rivers and streams and melting glaciers. The night before the swim, air temperatures in Gustavus, where Jeffrey and I were staying in a family-run lodge, and in the bay dropped well below freezing. The cold night sky was lit up with auroras. Whirling and wavering bands of light, rose, lapis blue, and neon green, particles of light stretched across the midnight blue sky. They rose, drifted, spread, and disappeared, and then out of nowhere, another shower of light swirled in the sky. The solar winds were blowing, linking and unlinking their magnetic field with the earth’s. Speeding electrons were bursting through the earth’s atmosphere, colliding with atoms of gas. The atoms were absorbing energy and creating showers of colored light. The auroras were a sort of meeting of the universe with the earth, and I took it as a good sign for the swim.
In Gustavus, a tiny town near Glacier Bay, at five a.m. Fritz Koshman, Dena Matkin, Debbie Woodruff, Jeffrey Cardenas, and I met at an ice-encased dock. We slipped and slid along the dock, until Fritz Koshman, the pilot, took our hands one by one and helped us carefully board the thirty-foot-long wooden skiff. Fritz was a stocky, broad-shouldered man with a bushy but well-kept beard and long brown hair. In addition to being a fisherman, he was known as a very good artist. He looked at me, and there was some hesitancy in his blue eyes.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
“It got awfully cold last night,” he said. “I’m not sure if we’re going to be able to do this. Guess we’ll just have to see how far we can get.” But he didn’t say any more. He started the motor, and we began our journey through Icy Strait.
As we entered Glacier Bay, roughly an hour later, Fritz was leaning out of the cabin, his eyes locked on the glassy, gray-blue water. “If the water was choppier, then at least I could see the ice. Or if the sun would stay in front of the clouds, it would