Beneath the surface

IT SEEMS ABSURD, EVEN TO ME. BUT I WAS nervous as I stepped into the water for the first big test -- scared, to be honest. Swim 200 yards. Fine. Tread water for 10 minutes. Fine. Ridiculously fine, if you judge the situation solely by my response to a question our instructor shouted as we bobbed and dog paddled in the lukewarm pool he uses to gauge the skills of his beginning scuba students.

“What’s the farthest you’ve ever swum?”

“Uh,” I mumbled, thinking back to age 15, when I first swam from England to France. “Thirty-three miles.”

That time I set a men’s and women’s record freestyling across the English Channel in 9 hours, 57 minutes. Since then, I’ve been the first person to swim across the Bering Strait, from Alaska to Siberia; the first to swim across the Strait of Magellan at the tip of South America. I’ve swum across Lake Baikal in Siberia, across the Gulf of Aqaba -- from Egypt to Israel -- and last year I jumped off a boat and swam a mile to the frozen shore of Antarctica, dodging icebergs and accompanied on the final stretch by curious penguins.

As I often explain to interviewers, I’m hydrophilic. I love all water -- rain, fountains, ponds, puddles and frigid oceans. I’ve spent my life swimming across water’s surface, wrapped in waves, cradled by currents, caressed by the winds. Water always was about being light, buoyant. Going underwater wasn’t natural at all.

Going under

This summer, I made a midlife decision to finally sink down and see the ocean from below. I immediately called a few friends for reassurance. The first told me her 16-year-old brother had drowned diving off California. The second recalled his first ocean dive off Florida: Someone kicked the regulator out of his mouth. He panicked, scratched his way to the surface and never dived again.

Another friend, however, told me that nothing compared with the tranquillity of scuba diving. There was bliss in his voice. His were the words I held onto.

That doesn’t mean I wasn’t scared. For one thing, I loathed the idea of putting on a wetsuit. I do my distance swimming in a Lycra swimsuit, shunning even the grease some swimmers use as thin insulation. My skin is part of my sensory radar, part of the system that keeps me attuned to the tactile pleasure of what I’m doing and alert to the internal and external threats -- temperatures, currents -- that can kill.

Then there are the weights. Scientists say my swimming success stems, in part, from a perfect combination of muscle and body fat. On the water’s surface, I float like a dolphin and move fast. The researchers who’ve studied me say I have neutral buoyancy. In less clinical moments, they go Zen and say, I’m “at one with the water.”

Wriggling into thick black neoprene and strapping on a lead belt gave me the willies. The first time I slid into the pool brought me to the brink of an anxiety attack. I had never felt heavy in water before, and I couldn’t get that Nicole Kidman movie, “The Hours,” out of my mind. I felt as if I were the Virginia Woolf character who loaded her pockets with rocks and walked into the river to die. With the weights and tank and regulator, I felt as if I were wearing a garbage can. And my body was working against me, making me float, making me clumsy.

I needed to adjust. For inspiration, I decided to watch the experts. Before my Antarctic swim, I studied seals and penguins. This time I went to Sweetie Thai in Cypress, my favorite Thai restaurant. I picked a table near a 50-gallon saltwater aquarium and sat watching the parrotfish, tangs and angelfish as they elevatored up and down, hovered, balanced.

Christine Thacker, an ichthyologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, later explained that most fish have swim bladders. “They take in gas through their mouths or through diffusion in their bloodstream. They add and subtract the gas automatically, the way you breathe. They don’t have air spaces in their bodies to regulate like people do.”

That was what I needed to know. I’d have to work on my hovering. Meanwhile, if I swam at a slow, constant rate, I’d have the balance to which I’m accustomed.

To complete our certification program, our instructor piloted us from Long Beach Harbor to Catalina Island on a boat called the Contender.

I’ve swum that channel twice. To avoid high winds, I swam it at night. Daylight swims are strange enough, more about feeling changes in the water temperature and currents, more mental navigation than seeing. In fact, in the English Channel I once swam and swam through what I thought was a vast bed of kelp. When I finally focused, it turned out to be thousands of heads of lettuce that had fallen off a ship. At night, the sensory experience is odder still. Sometimes I can see my hands moving, pale under my body, bubbles rolling off my fingers. Sometimes I see phosphorescent contrails left by fish.

The boats tracking me on my Catalina swims always kept their lights off to avoid attracting the curiosity of unpleasant creatures. Sometimes I could feel the rush of water as big forms moved below me. I’d swim and stare down and fight to stay in control by pushing my mind to other topics. Even as I stared through my goggles, usually all I saw was black water, mile after mile. Most of my swimming time is spent inside my own head.

Now, I gazed over the bow, looking for fins, but also -- inside my head again -- imagining what I might see there, beneath the sky’s reflection on the swells.

Fish out of water

The first three dives were all about skill stuff. Take off your mask and clear it. Take off the weights and put them back on. Buddy breathe.

Surprisingly, it tired me -- different muscles, I realized. And I don’t remember seeing anything.

In the evening, we began our last dive of the day at a place called Emerald Cove. Moving to the ladder at the stern, I took a giant stride.

At 72 degrees, the water was almost 40 degrees warmer than the Slurpee mix I swam through in Antarctica, but I couldn’t really feel it until the exposed flesh on my cheeks cut through the surface.

Weighted by a large scuba tank and a 30-pound weight belt, I punched a dark blue circle into the sea and sank instantly into it, dropping like Alice down the rabbit hole.

At first, the intense sensory experience did an awkward little dance with my decidedly underdeveloped underwater instincts. I gracefully moved between giant columns of glossy brown kelp, steadily kicking my way through arches and tunnels formed by draping fronds.

But when I slowed to admire the bead-shaped air bladders that climbed toward the distant surface my grace faded.

Two bright orange garibaldi, the size of dessert plates emerged from the kelp, swam over and stopped within inches of my mask. Their fins turned out at right angles from their sides, gently sculling.

Again I tried to stop, to stare back, but my arms flew out, my legs splayed and I toppled forward.

The fish shot each other looks that Gary Larson might have drawn in a Far Side cartoon. I could see the captions: “Fish out of water,” one garibaldi burbled, to which the other replied: “Must be that new subspecies of clownfish.”

More garibaldi joined in and followed me as I kicked toward the light beams streaming between kelp columns like spotlights in a dusty theater.

I suddenly realized I was not inside my head, I was seeing more than myself struggling with oppressive gear and uncertainty.

I swam farther into the wild sea forest, where spiny sea urchins pulsed in swaying clusters of periwinkle-colored kelp. Sea cucumbers the color of margaritas rested on rock outcroppings, their little horns wriggling in the currents.

I slowed and watched a small fish with a yellow spot on its back sample some tidbit. A calico bass swam within inches of my face. A black-eyed goby sat on the bottom staring up, while, overhead, shimmering anchovies swam in schools.

Too soon, my time was up. The sun had dropped by the time I hauled myself back onto the Contender.

I quickly stripped off the gear and dived into the water. I felt light and strong and fast. I swam like a surface-skimming bug. The water felt familiar again. It felt good.

But as we boated back to the mainland, something had changed.

There I was on the boat’s deck, staring into the black ocean. But my mind kept drifting beneath the water to that moment as I hovered, looking up through filtered rays of sunlight, following a stream of bubbles as they scrambled toward the sky, finally breaking that surface with which I’m so familiar.

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EQUIPMENT

Underwater innovation

With these three recent advances in scuba gear, you can make your dive safer and considerably more comfortable.

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Her life at the top

RECORD BOOK

Lynne Cox has swum in straits, gulfs and lakes all over the world. But there’s always another first out there.

1971: Swims across the Catalina Channel at age 14, in 12 hours, 36 minutes.

1972: Sets record for women and men for crossing the English Channel, in 9 hours, 57 minutes.

1973: At age 16, shaves 21 minutes off her record for crossing the English Channel, swimming it in 9 hours, 36 minutes.

1974: Sets a record for crossing the Catalina Channel, in 8 hours, 48 minutes.

1975: Becomes first woman to swim across the 50-degree waters of Cook Straits off New Zealand, in 12 hours, 2 minutes.

1976: Becomes first person to swim across the Strait of Magellan, in South America.

1979: Becomes first person to swim around the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa.

1987: Becomes first person to swim across the frigid waters of the Bering Strait, in 2 hours, 6 minutes.

1992: Becomes first person to swim across Lake Titicaca, the world’s highest large navigable lake, in the Andes Mountains.

1994: Becomes first person to swim the Gulf of Aqaba, from Egypt to Israel, and from Israel to Jordan.

2002: Becomes first person to do a serious swim in subzero waters off Antarctica, going 1.2 miles from a boat to shore in 25 minutes.

2003: Goes on her first scuba dive.