San Diego Woman Swims the 19 1/2-Mile Catalina Channel

Twenty-eight-year-old Cyrise Calvin reported for work at a computer trade show Monday exhausted, with gashes under her eyes and a stiff gait.

But her physical ailments paled next to her quiet sense of accomplishment. One day earlier she had battled the ocean currents of the Catalina Channel in an 11-hour swim. The feat makes her the first San Diego woman to swim the 19 1/2-mile channel since Florence Chadwick--now a San Diego stockbroker in her 70s--did it in 1952.

It wasn’t easy.

“There’s so many things that happened that night,” Calvin said. “It was rough. I definitely had to dig deep to make it.”

Calvin got in the water at about 1 a.m. Sunday off Santa Catalina Island and crawled onto a narrow stretch of beach on the Palos Verde Peninsula 10 hours, 59 minutes and 22 seconds later.

Along the way she battled deep ocean currents and a heavy chop that left her vomiting and unable to eat for hours as she swam. Her goggles sliced into her face, and when the sun finally rose and the waters calmed a bit, she had to worry about dodging traffic in coastal shipping lanes.

“The major problem we had was a very, very deep uneven storm chop,” said Michael Devlin, a fellow swimmer who organized Sunday’s swim and kayaked next to Calvin for hours, feeding her bits of food, tea and soda. “The hurricanes really affected the ocean, and there were waves coming from an odd direction. It was a very uneven swim environment--just a busy, busy sea. She was swallowing some water, and that’s why she got sick.”

That threw her entire training regimen--which had included a 15-mile swim from Pacific Beach to Del Mar--out the window.

“On all my training I would stop every 20 minutes for feedings. I would drink Gatorade. Every other feeding, I would eat bananas, fig bars, or power bars. But, because I was sick, and it was so choppy, they couldn’t feed me,” Calvin said, recalling the night that began with a glassy calm and near-full moon but quickly turned rough.

The choppiness made eating difficult too, because hanging on to the kayak would have disqualified her swim. She finally settled for 7-Up, and, 4 miles from shore, began popping bite-size chocolate bars.

“When I was sick I was pretty scared,” she said. “I knew I had to find something I could stomach. As long as I could stay hydrated I’d make it. If you stop taking fluids or eating, you get hypothermia.”

Calvin’s time was about average, said John York, who heads the Catalina Channel Swimming Federation--a 200-member organization of long-distance swimmers that monitored Calvin’s swim. A total of 46 men and 23 women have made it across the channel, he said.

Many more have tried and failed.

In 1927, 102 tried all at once. Only one made it: a 17-year-old Canadian boy. But then the motives were monetary.

The Wrigley family, who owned the island, wanted to lure tourists, York said. “William Wrigley offered $25,000 for anyone who could swim it. $25,000 was a major amount of money, so I mean anyone who even thought they could possibly get into the water showed up,” York said.

Since then, swimmers who have attempted the channel tend to be, like Calvin, a bit more prepared.

She grew up in Mission Viejo and swam competitively from the ages of 6 to 14.

“She was one of the fastest swimmers in the United States,” Bob West said of Calvin’s days as a Mission Viejo swimmer with the Nadadores, the swim club that used to produce most of this country’s Olympic swimmers. West, 56, last August became the oldest person to swim the Catalina Channel. Calvin kayaked and swam with him then, and his swim inspired her to try it herself. He did the same for her Sunday.

Calvin stopped swimming for years, but became a marathon runner at 19. When she moved to La Jolla to go to college, she returned to the water. “I’ve been swimming ever since,” she said.

Her experience includes a relay to Catalina Island with five other swimmers from her La Jolla swim club, and a 10-mile ocean race last year.

Her family and friends have helped a lot too, she said.

Calvin’s brother is a triathlete, and her father is an ultra-marathoner. Both were in the 36-foot boat that accompanied her Sunday, and, toward the end, she asked her brother to get in and swim with her--for hours.

“She made him stay out there and wouldn’t let him get back on the boat,” Calvin’s good friend, Janette Piankoff, said. “He was really exhausted.”

Bob West, Piankoff and Calvin’s brother and sister all swam the final half mile with her, helping her pace her strokes, Piankoff said.

Did Calvin consider calling it quits? “Not once,” she said.

But she did have some doubts about her sanity.

“At one point she looked up at me and said, ‘I don’t remember why I’m doing this,’ But I just said swim until you get to shore,” Piankoff said.

Piankoff, who originally met Calvin in the ocean on a winter swim, tried to keep Calvin’s spirits up with a moonlight serenade.

“I was singing that song that says ‘Only You,’ and ‘Moon River’,” Piankoff said, and yelling to her that Esther Williams would be proud.

Many people are proud.

“She’s the most honest athlete I’ve ever seen in my life. She never stopped. She never took a break. She just kept on going. She’s got a work ethic,” said Michael Devlin.

The lure of a night swim through a dark choppy sea is not lost on Devlin, who once swam around New York’s Manhattan Island.

“I think it’s one of the few areas where you have an opportunity to draw on all your resources--your mental, your physical, your soul,” Devlin said. “I think the solitude is overwhelming. When you’re running marathons, if you get tired you can walk. Swimming, if you stop you don’t sink, but you don’t go anywhere.”

The beauty of the ocean can be hypnotic, he added.

“The sky was full of stars. There was almost a full moon. The water was inky black,” he said of Sunday’s swim. “There’s a great peace. I suppose it’s all of that. It’s something nothing else can duplicate.”

Calvin’s immediate plan is to rest, but she also has her eye on the English Channel. “It’s definitely in my mind. It’s out there. But right now, I just want to recover from this. It was pretty draining mentally,” she said.

When she is ready for her next challenge, however, she’ll have an enthusiastic team of fans lined up.

Bob West plans to go to England to support her, as does Piankoff. “I’m working on my repertoire of songs to sing to her,” she said.