2nd Time’s the Charm for Channel Swimmer

An exhausted but triumphant Vicki Keith waded ashore in San Pedro Saturday after becoming the first swimmer to complete the 22-mile crossing from Santa Catalina Island using the butterfly stroke.

Wearing a swim cap emblazoned with the maple leaf of her native Canada, Keith trudged onto Cabrillo Beach at 4:27 p.m., 14 hours, 53 minutes and 26 seconds after wading into the chilly Pacific near Emerald Bay on the island.

“I never doubted I would make it,” Keith said, “but there were three or four hours there that I was concerned it would be after dark.”

Determined Return

Keith said she was unable to see the beach through gray haze. Then, she said, the shore finally broke into the view and she knew her arrival would be right on schedule.

The swim marked a determined return for the 28-year-old school teacher who failed to complete the same swim in July, surrendering to excruciating pain in her joints after more than 19 hours in the water.

This time, Keith said she was sore but was able to continue. Unlike July’s attempt, she said her performance was not daunted by jet lag.

The swim capped a summer in which she completed three major marathon swimming feats--crossings of the English Channel, the Juan de Fuca Strait separating the state of Washington from Victoria, British Columbia, and now the Catalina Channel--all with the butterfly stroke.

The stroke, in which both arms flail forward in the air and are then pulled through the water, expends so much energy that Keith said she had been told that swimming the channel would be impossible. She added that she hopes to start swimming again as soon as today--and can’t wait to return to using a regular crawl stroke after months of butterfly stroke training.

Thought of Sharks

Keith said the trip generally went smoothly and her spirits remained high. But in the black, 68-degree seas of early morning, she said thoughts of a shark attack kept running through her head.

“The first hour and a half, the only thing I could think about was sharks,” she said. “I was looking everywhere.” She said she saw anchovies and jelly fish--being careful to avoid a sting--and was even trailed by a school of dolphins without ever encountering a shark.

Keith was accompanied along the way by a crew aboard the support boat, “Cold Spaghetti” out of San Pedro, and a team on paddle boards to authenticate her feat for the record books. She was aided by near-ideal weather conditions--relatively calm seas and mild currents--and she credited her navigator for choosing a successful route. She stopped several times along the way and treaded water as she talked with the crew and took quick gulps of hot chocolate or bites of fruit cocktail. Then she would resume the long, lonely ordeal--churning along with 24 to 28 strokes a minute.

Dave Clark and Margaret Dickson, observers for the Catalina Channel Swimming Federation who went along to verify the swim, said Keith was in such a good mood that she teased members of her crew.

63rd to Swim Channel

She becomes the 63rd swimmer to cross the channel, albeit the first to use the unique stroke. The fastest crossing ever was made by Penny Lee Dean, swimming from the mainland to the island in September, 1976, in 7 hours, 15 minutes.

In attempting the marathon swimming feats, Keith was trying to raise money for local charities that include the Pediatric AIDS Clinic at County-USC Medical Center and the UCLA Children’s Artificial Limb Bank. Her representatives said they did not yet know how much money she raised.