Soviets to Welcome U.S. Swimmer After Her Dip in Icy Bering Strait

The Soviet Union gave endurance swimmer Lynne Cox permission Thursday to swim the icy waters of the Bering Strait and said a Soviet party would meet her at the International Dateline to give assistance.

Now only the weather stands in the way of her swim across the 2.7-mile expanse between here and Big Diomede Island, in Soviet territory.

Fog and a persistent drizzle kept her expedition grounded at the Eskimo village of Wales on the western tip of Alaska most of Thursday. After the rain stopped and the fog cleared, she flew by helicopter to this small, rocky outcropping 26 miles offshore. There is a chance she can make her swim today.

Cox, of Los Alamitos, is a 16-year veteran of marathon swims. She had been waiting for Soviet permission for her crossing since July 23, when project director Joe Coplan sent a telex answering a Soviet request for information on members of her party and their needs.

The Cox party received a report from here late Wednesday night about unusual activity on Big Diomede. Two Soviet vessels were anchored off the south end of Big Diomede and two tents had been erected on the beach.

The Soviet Sports Committee sent telexes Thursday morning to Coplan’s office in New York, U.S. Swimming Inc. in Colorado Springs and 1990 Goodwill Games Chairman Bob Walsh in Seattle, who had been instrumental in developing Soviet contacts. The telexes read:

‘Ready to Render Assistance’

“Please inform where Miss Cox is at present time (and) what day until Aug. 12 she intends to carry out the swim. We need exact Greenwich and Moscow time. We are ready to render assistance. Your group will be met at the International Dateline.”

The swim, expected to take 1 1/2 hours to 3 hours, was planned for the week of Aug. 5 to avoid the deteriorating weather of the sub-Arctic autumn.

In granting permission, the Soviets indicated that the 15 people listed on the expedition’s manifest, including scientists, journalists, photographers, a Roman Catholic priest and a Japanese broadcasting executive, would not require visas.

The channel between Big Diomede and here is sometimes turbulent and always cold--now about 40 degrees Fahrenheit. A few adventurers have walked across its frozen surface in the winter and have been detained temporarily by the Soviets, but no one has ever tried to swim it.

“It’s colder than this,” Cox said, raising a glass of ice water at dinner one night this week. “This is 45 degrees.”

She has researched the conditions as much as possible, but there is still doubt about the currents in the strait.

Oceanographic charts say the current flows from the Bering Sea north into the Chukchi Sea, and local natives have told Cox that it varies from 4 to 6 knots. Personnel at the small U.S. Navy station at Wales said, however, that it flows south at half a knot.

Check With Hunters

Cox planned to check with the walrus hunters here.

If the current is strong to the north, she plans to start her swim from the south end of this island and perhaps swim as far as six miles overall, angling against the current.

The Soviet boats expected to assist are an icebreaker and a fishing vessel. Cox will be escorted from this island by her group in outboard-powered walrus skin boats chartered from the Eskimos.

“It will be quite a contrast,” Cox said.

Cox, a free-lance writer, has been swimming in various bodies of water throughout the world since she was a teen-ager. Her adventures, she said, have included a 1973 swim across the English channel; an ill-fated swim down the Nile made memorable by “mud, slime, dead rats and raw sewage”; a seven-mile “piece of cake” swim off Japan and encounters with “jellyfish as big as trash can lids” on a 12-mile swim from Denmark to Sweden.