Heading for a Chilly Swim in Siberia : Lynne Cox Returning to U.S.S.R. for a Dip in Lake Baikal

A year and three days after she swam the Bering Strait from United States to Soviet soil, Lynne Cox of Los Alamitos will leave Los Angeles today to begin Phase 1 of her attempt to swim Lake Baikal in Siberia late this month.

She will fly to West Germany via Washington, D.C., then drive to Austria for a week of cold-water training before continuing on to Moscow Aug. 18.

After a news conference in Moscow, she and a five-person support team will be transported by the Soviets about 2,600 miles farther east to Irkutsk on the shore of Baikal.

At that point, she will have circled about two-thirds of the globe, but Cox, 31, doesn’t tend to do things the easy way.

When she departs, she will be about $80,000 short of her original $106,000 budget, which she had hoped would allow extensive training in cold-water locales.

“It’s been cut substantially,” she said. “We can’t have any disasters.”

Cox has been frustrated at her inability to obtain significant financial support from major American corporations for what promises to be a heavily covered event in the Soviet Union. Last year’s Bering Strait feat was reported in newspapers and on television throughout the U.S.S.R., and when Cox was in Moscow working on arrangements this summer, she was recognized on the streets and treated as a celebrity.

“People ask me, ‘Why isn’t corporate America doing something?’ ” she said. “I don’t know. (Soviet leader Mikhail) Gorbachev toasts you at a White House banquet and that doesn’t mean anything?”

At least this time she’ll leave home confident that the Russians know she’s coming. A year ago she didn’t receive permission to land on Big Diomede Island until the day before her attempt, compounding her usual money problems with political concerns--not a good way to keep her mind focused on the effort.

“You do what you have to do with what you have,” she said. “This is part of it. It’s a mountain you have to climb, and the swim is the summit. As the swims become more difficult, so do the logistics.

“It completely wipes you out sometimes, but if you’re an endurance athlete, you keep going. You go through ups and down all the time.

“But then someone calls up out of the blue and says, ‘We’d like to contribute $5,000 because we believe in what you’re doing.’ ”

That was Redi-Tag, a Huntington Beach company that makes filing labels. Cox talked them up to $10,000.

Lufthansa, the West German airline, will fly her to Moscow, and smaller local businesses have helped, along with many individuals.

“The other day, $1,200 came in just from people who want to help,” Cox said. “A guy in San Francisco who is handicapped sends what must be half his income. A man in Leisure World sends $5. Every day people keep sending in a few dollars. It’s really nice, and at the same time it increases the pressure of responsibility I feel toward those who are supporting me.”

The date of the swim depends on the weather--and, perhaps, the whim of the Soviets, who are seeking maximum exposure to further Gorbachev’s glasnost program.

Lake Baikal, 60 miles north of Mongolia, has not been on the usual tourist track. The lake--395 miles long, 49 miles at its widest, 18 wide at its narrowest and a mile deep--has conditions that are potentially formidable: water no warmer than 50 degrees and winds gusting to 80 knots.

Cox will train at Hallstatter Lake near the Austrian village of Obertraun. The glacier-fed lake has a temperature of about 50 degrees, which will give her medical handlers an opportunity to monitor her reactions for reference during the Baikal attempt.

In a recent training exercise at Portage Glacier in Alaska, she swam in 35-degree water for nine minutes “to find the outer limits,” she said.

She found that dropping from 38 degrees--the low point near the end of her 2-hour 5-minute Bering swim--to 35 multiplies the effects by degrees.

“My fingers and toes were very cold, but when they took my temperature afterward it had gone up two degrees,” she said. “Something is happening to take care of me in cold water.”

She has a new support team this time. After the Bering swim, there was a falling-out with project director Joe Coplan of New York, and Drs. William Keatinge of London and Jan Nyboer of Anchorage were unavailable to assist this time.

The new team:

--Dr. Gabriella Miotto, 30, a UC Irvine Medical Center resident who has done research in hypothermia.

--Peter Kassander, 40, of Washington, a Russian-speaking specialist in Soviet affairs on loan from the Goodwill Games organization.

--Sandy Field, 32, of Long Beach, an experienced distance swimmer who will serve as medical assistant.

--Philip Monteleone, 34, a Long Beach banker and distance swimmer who is coordinating fund raising and logistics.

--Ross Roseman, 31, an Alaska Airlines pilot from Seattle and high school swimming teammate of Cox’s who will serve as navigator on the swim.

“I think it’s going to work better,” Cox said. “The people this time have been in it for three or four months, whereas the last time we all just kind of met in Alaska.”