Making Vows Hold Water : Pamela Pole kept her promise to jump off Balboa Pier in an attempt to swim to Catalina and made another promise to the man who searched the water for her.

Remember a few weeks ago when we talked to Pamela Pole, the unemployed, divorced 37-year-old mother of two who was determined to swim to Catalina? What had begun as a grand plan to have a relay with dozens of swimmers--raising money for a day care center--had collapsed bit by bit until it was only going to be her and a friend swimming--for the principle of it since there were scarcely any donations--with a boat to pace them. Then that fell apart, and it was just going to be her and a support boat taking off from Newport’s Balboa Pier on Aug. 21.

“No matter what, I’m jumping off that pier at 5 a.m. and some boat better follow me,” she declared then. One might have taken that to just be a plucky figure of speech until seeing the headline on a local paper a couple of days later: “Woman rescued during mysterious attempt to swim to Catalina.”

According to the account, Pole had shown up on the pier near midnight on Aug. 20. She was observed giving away what little money she had, reading some Bible verses and stripping down to her bathing suit and swim cap. She then jumped off the pier and headed alone out to sea. Boats and a helicopter searched for her for two hours before giving up. Pole turned up around 9 a.m., suffering from mild hypothermia, after being plucked out of the sea three miles out by a fisherman.

We tried reaching Pole at her home in San Clemente. “Oh, she’s honeymooning on Catalina,” said one of her sons, sounding nearly as confused as we. When last we’d spoke with Pole the week before, she didn’t even have a boyfriend.

Well, it turns out that jump off the pier wasn’t her only leap of faith that weekend. She’s got herself a husband, if nautical marriages hold water, and she’s starting life anew with him in a boat moored in Newport Harbor.

Always looking for a twist, some of the reporters here had joked that maybe Pole had married the fisherman who rescued her. That actually is not far from the case. Her new mate, Jay Barnes, is the sailor she’d hired to pace her swim in a support boat. The only hitch with that plan was Pole didn’t tell him that she was starting early, and she’d been at sea six hours before Barnes even began looking for her.

I went swimming out in the channel at night once, and even with splashing friends, a handy boat and a tequila-fortified will, it was an eerie, isolating and mildly terrifying time. Half the time you’re in a trough with nothing to see but water swelling around you. You float better in saltwater, but there’s also the ever-present knowledge that if your feet touch something, it won’t be the bottom, but, rather, something with a proclivity to bite you in two.

Pole was out there alone, with almost no moon, for more than eight hours with nothing but her tired muscles and her thoughts, and it had to be strange.

“It was a trip,” she confirmed when she got back to us last week. “There was a red tide, so the water was phosphorescent. Every time my hand hit the water it would spark , and the water underneath me was a sheet of white. I was doing the breaststroke, singing, talking to God, begging him near the end.”

Lest one get the impression that Pole married her Newport husband for money: She had to borrow the quarter she used to call The Times offices. She, Barnes and I met and talked in front of the American Legion hall on the peninsula’s 15th Street. His 26-foot sailboat, where they are living, is moored off the dock there.

Pole was still a bit sunburned from her eventful weekend, but otherwise was looking her usual robust self. Her blond hair was tied with bits of ribbon she’d found on the sidewalk.

Tan and mustached, Barnes has the weathered, relaxed look of a lifelong bachelor, which the 42-year-old was until now. The San Diego native has spent 24 of his years living on the water in Newport Harbor. He repairs and sells boats, and takes work as a delivery skipper and rigger when he can.

The couple sat next to each other on a bench, and often hugged, as Pole related her story.

She had told us previously that her resolve to do the swim had only been strengthened when her plans for a relay swim fell apart and when her swimming partner bailed. She wanted to prove by attempting the swim that unemployed mothers such as she were worthy of work.

So, on the night before her announced swim date, she was down on the peninsula as the boat was being readied. She carbed-out on clam-sauce spaghetti, then left Barnes and a friend (who had planned to go in the boat to pray for Pole and hand her water) to walk and think.

One of the things she thought about was that the Coast Guard had refused to issue her a permit for the swim, understandably claiming that the venture was inadequately prepared. She knew that if she left at 5 a.m. as she’d planned she would be caught, and was worried that Barnes might get in trouble if his boat was with her. He was a friend of a friend of a friend she had met a few days earlier when her other plans for a boat fell through.

So she went to the pier and decided to go for it, figuring her friend would check the pier soon, see her clothes there and have Barnes take off after her in the boat. Instead, after spending hours readying the sailboat, her friend and Barnes were asleep.

“I had $4 left and didn’t need it, so I gave it to this couple that was laying out there at the pier that I felt bad for. I had a Bible and a picture of my two sons. I read some Scripture, Psalms 23, ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of death. . . .’

“I took my clothes off, my sweats and my son’s hiking boots. I put olive oil on--it’s thick and represents the Holy Spirit. I prayed a little and saw the clock ticking. I was having some anxiety, but I said, ‘Come on Pam, It’s Aug. 21. You made a vow.’ The scariest part for me was the initial jumping in because I thought they were going to stop me,” she said.

She hadn’t explained to anyone on the pier what she was doing, because she was worried they wouldn’t let her go. “Maybe I should have told someone,” she said, “because after I jumped in somebody had reported that I’d committed suicide, and the police came and arrested my clothes. I’d put on my Speedo cap! Most people wanting to kill themselves don’t put a Speedo cap on.”

Her main concern in the first hour of the swim was in not getting caught.

“I looked back and saw the helicopter. I didn’t know if they were looking for me or not, because the police helicopter is always around there. I prayed, ‘Lord, if this is for me, just blind their eyes to me because I want to fulfill my vow,’ ” she said. They never came close to spotting her, she said, because she was already much farther out to sea.

In her second hour she felt comfortable and made good time. Instead of the current being against her, as it typically is to Catalina, she said there was a southwest swell aiding her.

“The channel was the hardest part, because I couldn’t see. It looked to me like there was a boat waiting by one of these buoy things, and I started imagining resting my arms on the tail, but there was no boat there when I got there,” she said.

That also was where Pole lost her sole provision, a jar of honey she’d been towing in a sack. She says the name Pamela is biblically linked to honey, “and I also figured if a shark came along I’m bomp it in the nose with it.” She managed to have a drop of it, then a wave carried it away.

Despite recent sightings of a great white off Catalina, she says she wasn’t worried about sharks. “With the phosphorescence making the water look like a sheet of white below me, I felt like there was a shield beneath me protecting me.”

With the current in her favor, she thinks she may have been swimming 15-minute miles. She thinks she saw the lights of Avalon, and may have only been a mile away when the current turned and started dragging her back. Those familiar with the channel currents regard this scenario as highly unlikely, but let’s cut her a little slack, shall we?

In any event, she found herself fighting the current and losing. “I was starting to really get cold. I’d hit a warm pocket every so often, but I also hit some really cold ones, and I was exhausted. But I knew Jay was looking for me. He was my ray of hope.

“Then I saw two sail boats. One of them looked like Jay’s because it was flying the American flag. The swells were going up all around me, and I was shouting, screaming, trying to be seen, but they went the other way.

“Those last few hours were the hardest, waiting for someone to find me. I started begging, ‘Lord, I want to be cremated in the ocean, not die in it.’ ”

Barnes had indeed been zig-zagging all over looking for her, once he’d realized at 6 a.m. that she’d jumped the gun. But it was fishermen in a speed boat who found her three miles off the Newport coast and brought her in to the Coast Guard.

“The Coast Guard people started chewing my butt off, and I just was crying. I couldn’t even talk to them about it. I felt ashamed. They really shamed me, saying I was going to commit suicide. They gave me a wool blanket, which is very uncomfortable after swimming,” she said.

When she was released, she borrowed clothes and money from a friend and caught the express over to Catalina, where she figured Barnes would be looking for her. They found each other on the beach the following day.

“By the time Jay found me my cheeks were all swollen,” she said, running fingers through her hair. “I looked like some beast. My nose was out to here. My hair was all tangled and I was in these borrowed clothes. I was warped . . . . I felt scummy. But he accepted me that way.

“Jay and I stayed up all night, talking and giggling. He was such a neat guy, I asked him to marry me. I worried if that was right, then he ended up asking me to marry him. He was the captain of his ship, so he married us.”

Asked if that’s a binding marriage, Barnes said, “In front of God it is. We’ll also say our vows in front of a preacher, but we don’t have the money right now for a real wedding and honeymoon.”

He gave her a ring, a manly thing with an oval stone that only fit her finger after he tied a bit of shoelace around its underside.

“He’s Recycleable Man,” Pole said. “We’ve been surviving on nothing while he’s been waiting on a check. But he can make something from nothing. He made a kite out of sticks and some paper.”

Asked if it had been love at first sight, Barnes said, “It took a little while. At first I thought she was out there somewhere, not really crazy but out there . We spent the whole night talking and the next day I was in love with her. I looked into her heart and said, ‘This is it.’ I’ve been alone for a long time. I’ve been looking for a good woman, and sure enough, she stepped right into my life.”

They still have a few details to iron out, such as moving her children in after making Barnes’ boats (he also has a 25-foot motorboat) fit for family habitation. “We’re getting the living quarters together now,” Pole said. “I cleaned up his sink. He was definitely a bachelor.”

There must be easier ways to find a husband, but Pole wouldn’t change a thing.

“It’s destiny. He’s my soul mate,” she said. “We just have so much fun together, I don’t think we’ll have a problem. I’ve waited all my life for someone like him. He’s my ray and I’m his sunshine.”