Channel Surfing Indeed! : South Bay Paddlers Set Record From England to France

It’s been more than a month since their historic crossing of the English Channel, but the seven members of the South Bay Paddleboard Club say the memories will last a lifetime.

“It was overcast and cold, really cold,” said Craig Welday, 43, an engineer with the Redondo Beach Fire Department. “The air was cold. The water was cold. It rained on us going across. It never got warm.”

Yes, but there were the sights along the way.

“Lots of boats, big boats. A lot of ferries. Major shipping lanes,” said Mark Levy, 38, co-owner of a Redondo Beach coffee house. “Four lanes of traffic. It’s the busiest channel in the world.”

But at last, after nearly seven hours of bobbing like Popsicles on a bumpy sea, maneuvering past supertankers while fighting seasickness, there was the landing at sunny Cap Gris Nez, France.

The sense of accomplishment was overwhelming.

“We were stoked,” said Mark Levy’s brother, Derek, 37, a Manhattan Beach chiropractor.

They made history, sort of, by covering the 22 miles in a group paddling time of 6 hours 52 minutes. That shattered the world record of 14 hours, set years ago by an Irishman named A. Looney, who just happens to be the only other person to have officially crossed the channel on a paddleboard.

But it was quite an accomplishment nonetheless.

“The biggest accomplishment is the fact that we got seven guys across, together, without killing each other,” Mark Levy said.

“We waited through eight days of gale-force winds. The barometric low was the lowest recorded in July ever in England. Waves were breaking over the Dover jetty and the manager of the hotel said he had never seen that, so we just chose to worst time possible. We made the crossing on the last possible day, before we had to come home.”

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Swimmers have been trying the English Channel for years, calling it the ultimate challenge. One of nine succeeds, usually in well over 10 hours.

Long-distance paddlers, members of a fairly small community of mostly surfers and lifeguards, have for the most part stuck to competition in warmer waters of the world.

Enter the South Bay Paddleboard Club. Citing boredom with the competitive tour, it claims it is branching out.

Only two of its seven members paddled in last Sunday’s prestigious Catalina Classic, an annual event covering 32 miles from the isthmus to the Manhattan Beach pier. Mark Levy finished second in the stock division--boards 12 feet or smaller--in 7:25. Welday was one of 26 paddlers who scratched because of strong winds and heavy seas.

“We’d all been to Catalina,” Derek Levy said. “We said, ‘That’s fine but let’s try something else.’ So we started thinking about other paddles that would be epic and the first thing that came to mind was the English Channel.”

The seven paddlers--Welday, Derek and Mark Levy, 38; Tim Ritter, 35; Michael Lee, 38; Charlie Didinger, 51, and John Matesich, 58--had some training runs, 12 miles across San Francisco Bay, 24 miles across Lake Tahoe, 20 miles in a bay-to-bay race off San Diego.

Then it was off to England.

The Levys arrived before the others because Derek and Mark wanted to paddle across the Strait of Gibraltar. No sweat, they thought. A 17 1/2-mile crossing, 4 1/2 hours at most.

They left Gibraltar, an English city in Spain, at 2:45 p.m. They told their father, Sol, they would call him when they arrived in Ceuta, a Spanish city on the Moroccan coast, about 8 p.m.

A Gibraltar lifeguard, thinking they were merely going to paddle around the famous Rock, tried to warn them even against that. They didn’t tell him they were crossing the strait, fearing they would be denied permission.

And off they went, setting a course for Africa. The first half of the crossing went as planned, but in the middle of the strait the wind was blowing 15 knots and the shifting swells had built to three to six feet.

Derek Levy, who had never been seasick, was as queasy as a kid on a roller-coaster and had trouble keeping up. “And then I hit the wall, like a runner does,” he said. “I was out of it.”

Dark figures began showing beneath the surface. One passed close enough that they could see it was a large shark. The others came in a wave.

“Then they turned and came back at us from behind,” Mark Levy said. “Derek screamed, ‘It’s a big shark,’ and I thought it was too, but just then they jumped out of the water and we realized they were just dolphins.”

Back at Gibraltar, the lifeguard, still unaware of the Levys’ intentions to cross the strait, became worried when they failed to return. A rescue operation was launched.

“He goes to the police, tells them that two Americans are gone,” Sol Levy said. “The police call the Coast Guard, they send out a helicopter, a search boat. They notify the civil guard . . . “

Darkness fell as the Levys made their way into Ceuta harbor. They were met by a police officer who carted them off to jail.

“We told him we left from La Linea, which is part of Spain, but in reality we crossed from Gibraltar,” Mark Levy said. “Because we landed in Ceuta, which is part of Spain, we didn’t want to get in trouble for crossing international boundaries. But the guy said it wasn’t possible to paddle across and took us to a guard shack.”

It was after 10 p.m. The rescue effort hadn’t turned up anybody. Sol Levy thought his sons were dead. He explained to authorities that they had planned to paddle to Morocco.

Word spread to Ceuta, to the guard shack.

“This Spanish guy comes up to us and says, ‘Wait a minute, they’re looking for two American guys. Is your dad looking for you?,’ ” Mark Levy said. “We ended up spending the night in Ceuta, in a first-class hotel, had the greatest dinner in the world and caught the next ferry home.”

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Back in England with the rest of the group, the paddlers were eager to tackle the channel. But as the weather worsened, frustration mounted. The group had worked hard, preparing for the task, drumming up support from South Bay sponsors, getting permission to cross.

A week passed and the paddlers had one more day. The mood was somber.

While passing time, they visited a historic church at Canterbury, lighted candles and asked the vicar to say a prayer for them.

When they returned to their hotel, they got word from the boatman who was to accompany them across that the storm was finally breaking, but that another was on the way.

There was a small window of opportunity. They would leave Dover at dawn.

Dawn broke amid showers and a brisk wind, but the channel was smooth enough. They got on their boards--12 to 16 feet long--and started paddling to France.

Sol Levy, on the escort boat, supplied them with food and drink via pole and monitored traffic in the shipping lanes. The swells seemed to hit the paddlers from every direction.

“Mark paddles up to me and says, ‘You don’t look so good,’ Welday recalled. “ ‘You look kind of yellow. I really started feeling bad then. But he said, ‘Just keep paddling, don’t stop.’ ”

He didn’t.

The group inched toward France, whose sunny bluffs seemed so close, so inviting. Yet with three miles to go, the current started working against them.

Eventually they made it past the current and, one by one, hit the beach at Cap Gris Nez, the Levys being the first after 6 hours 29 minutes.

Getting off their boards, they couldn’t help but look back toward England.

“When we looked back, it was raining and there was lightning and thunder in the channel,” Mark Levy said. “But it was sunny in France.”

And for that alone they were all pretty stoked.