Los Alamitos : Drizzle Delays Trip to Jump-Off Island for Swim to Soviet Union

“The first thing you’ll see is a dome,” pilot Doug Hollie said as he banked the twin-engine Piper Chieftain carrying part of the Lynne Cox expedition around the cliffs and into Wales, Alaska, an Eskimo village of 153 on the tip of the Seward Peninsula.

There it was, the Wales Community Center, home for the night.

Hollie circled once and then approached the dirt strip over the beach and village cemetery. The flight from Nome took 45 minutes over the Bering Sea and barren tundra at altitudes between 350 and 750 feet as he stayed under the rain clouds that blanketed the entire area Wednesday.

It had been clear for some time that Cox’s plan to swim the Bering Strait to the Soviet Union is at the whim of the weather and the Russians. On Wednesday, even the Los Alamitos woman’s travel plans to Little Diomede Island, where she is to start her swim, were thrown into doubt by the stormy sky.

The daylong drizzle delayed Cox’s arrival on Little Diomede at least until today. She had planned to proceed directly from Wales to the island 26 miles offshore by helicopter, but her group of 15 scientists, journalists, photographers and support personnel--including a Roman Catholic priest--had to spend Wednesday night in sleeping bags at the community center.

Larry Kitchen picked up the group at the airstrip in his battered yellow van. The shuttle to the community center cost $3 per head.

The huge concrete igloo dominates the landscape, sitting amid two rows of houses of tar paper and corrugated tin lining the muddy main street. A 30-foot-long jawbone of a whale lies along one side, partly overgrown by weeds.

When Cox, 30, arrived at 4 p.m., she looked out at the whitecaps and decided she couldn’t have made the swim anyway. A veteran of 16 years of similar efforts around the world, she seemed to take the glitch in stride.

“This is part of it,” she said.

The Soviet Union has not yet given Cox permission to swim into its waters, but the group planned to continue to Little Diomede today in any case, weather permitting.

If arrangements for escort boats are in order, she could swim this afternoon, with or without Soviet permission.