Lured by English Channel’s Siren Song

Over and over again, we had been warned of the many risks we would face while swimming the English Channel: hypothermia from the cold water, exhaustion from the high seas and strong currents, shoals of stinging jellyfish.

But nothing had prepared us for the near miss with a container ship.

Suddenly, it loomed up to the left, its mammoth hulk bearing down on our small guide boat, the Ocean Breeze, and Sophie, our youngest swimmer.

Kicking up a three-foot swell, the blue prow of the Daina was on a collision course with us, and there was little doubt about the outcome of a crash between our 38-foot boat and a ship soaring five stories up to its bridge and piled high with containers.

“What the hell is he doing?” shouted Dave Whyte, pilot of the Ocean Breeze. The Daina, sailing down the middle of the channel from north to south, was far outside the two main shipping lanes of one of the world’s busiest waterways.

As a crewman raced to the port side of the Ocean Breeze and frantically signaled the ship with a hand-held searchlight, the rest of us shouted starboard, trying to tell Sophie to stop swimming.

Its horns blaring, the Daina swept past, missing us by about 50 feet, throwing out a wake that rocked Sophie and the Ocean Breeze.

Within minutes, our reaction had changed from fear to relief to laughter. As we listened over our boat’s radio, a British Coast Guard officer rebuked the Daina for being out of the shipping lanes, and one of the ship’s crewmen apologized in broken English.

For this 50-year-old American, who had put together a relay team to find out what it’s like to swim the English Channel, it was the first of several times that day that I wondered: How, and why, does anyone do this?

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More than 125 years after Matthew Webb, a 27-year-old sailor from Shropshire, England, officially became the first person to swim across the channel unassisted, more than 100 people follow his example each year. They swim as soloists or on relay teams, or sail aboard unorthodox craft such as gondolas and foot-powered dinghies.

Smeared with porpoise oil and consuming red meat for strength, coffee for stimulation, and beer and brandy for courage, Webb crossed the channel in 21 hours, 45 minutes, on Aug. 24, 1875, becoming one of the world’s first international athletic stars. An overnight hero, he was honored with parades, speeches, cannon salutes, portraits and poems.

It was 1911 before another Briton, Thomas Burgess, became the second swimmer to make it, on his 14th try. In 1926, Gertrude Ederle, a 19-year-old American, was the first woman to swim across. She was rewarded with a ticker-tape parade back home in New York.

Today, solo swimmers -- who have graduated to personal trainers and high-energy drinks -- often go much faster than Webb did. American Chad Hunderby, the current record holder, crossed in 7 hours, 17 minutes in 1994.

But rarely do today’s swimmers receive much recognition outside hometown newspapers or swimming publications and Internet sites.

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As the crow flies, the English Channel -- where about 500 ships travel a day -- is more than 21 miles wide.

But for swimmers, the real distance between England and France is often much longer, with strong currents and tides pushing them in a large S-shaped path.

Soloists, who often suffer from numbness and disorientation, are sometimes swept far off course as they struggle toward France’s Cap Gris-Nez peninsula.

Some give up not far from shore.

The human body loses heat much faster in water than on land, and at least two people have died of hypothermia while swimming the waterway.

This season, a relay team was disqualified when one of its swimmers was pulled out shivering uncontrollably after only half an hour at sea, 30 minutes short of the minimum required for an individual stint.

The Channel Swimming Assn., which monitors compliance with its many rules from guide boats, bars anything as wimpy as a wetsuit. Why? In honor of Webb’s hardiness.

So swimmers often take the only precaution allowed: covering their bodies with pounds of grease in an effort to stay warm.

Despite that, less than half the soloists succeed in crossing. Some don’t even get a chance during the four-month season, thanks to bad weather and high seas.

Because people on relay teams usually swim only two or three 60-minute legs, the five on our team didn’t use grease, a move I came to regret.

Three men and two women, ranging in age from 17 to 62, we began our adventure just before 5 a.m. on a cold September morning, the first time in days that the channel had been calm enough for swimmers.

Our guide boat, the Ocean Breeze, idled about 60 feet off desolate Shakespeare Beach, between Dover and Folkestone.

“Let’s get started,” said Whyte, our no-nonsense British pilot. “It’s a long way to France.”

That was it. No ceremony. No pep talk. No cheers.

In fact, as 17-year-old Sophie Mitchinson took off her coat, stood on the deck in her swimsuit, goggles and cap, then jumped into the 64-degree water, the rest of us on the team looked more like stunned witnesses at the scene of an accident than her relay team partners.

As we watched from the Ocean Breeze, it was too dark to see anything but the two green glowsticks that had been attached to Sophie as she swam ashore to officially touch England, then started back toward us and France.

For the next 11 hours and 29 minutes, the five of us -- four novices and Mike Read, 62, a former “King of the Channel” with 32 solo swims to his credit -- would withstand one challenge after another.

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With nothing to hang onto and no protection from the bone-chilling water, an odd combination of fear and boredom sets in as you swim. Swimmers count, sing or think for distraction.

At one point, as I swam through 4-foot swells, taking occasional mouthfuls of salt water, I looked out of my foggy goggles to see the team waving. Lost in my focus on swimming, I had been wandering away from the boat without realizing it.

“You know,” said 38-year-old Matthew Padfield, who had to drop off the team because of an ear infection while training, “when I saw the expression on your face, you looked like you thought you were back home gardening.”

Each time I returned to the Ocean Breeze after swimming about two miles in an hour, I was shivering. Once I finished with a leg cramp. After two swims, the salt water had left my hands swollen, and they remained that way for several days.

Then came a challenge even more daunting than the Daina: seasickness.

After months of training in open-water swimming -- in harbors and oceans -- we still took seasickness pills the day of the crossing attempt.

But as we approached mid-channel, soon after the Daina gave us the scare, two team members -- Morag Hughes and Nick Hunt, both 46 -- started feeling ill.

Eventually, both would vomit overboard.

Earlier in the day, we had been surprised to hear that an American man who had begun his solo swim right behind us had lasted only four hours. The food handouts from his boat had left him violently seasick.

For members of relay teams, that risk is even greater, since the guide boats often rock heavily as they slowly follow the swimmer in the water.

On this overcast day, the seas were so rough that the only way we avoided falling over on deck was to sit down or hold onto something.

Soon, Sophie, Mike and I were exchanging worried looks, knowing that if Nick or Morag became too ill to swim, our team would be disqualified under Channel Swimming Assn. rules that bar any change in the order of swimmers or having a swimmer drop out after the team begins.

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Somehow, both managed to continue their swimming, partly because they felt less dizzy in the water than when aboard the Ocean Breeze.

By the time we neared France, a fast current pushing left to right caused us to miss the harbor we had been aiming for. With all of us yelling at Nick to swim as fast as possible, he managed to wash up on a shore of black, slimy rocks.

Soon, Morag and I had jumped in and were swimming after him, overwhelmed by the emotion of our success.

As we touched shore and stood in France, looking back toward England and then up at the green farm fields, cliffs and a World War II bunker, the rush of relief and achievement was phenomenal.

But it didn’t last long.

No one was there to greet us, of course. And soon we had to swim back to the Ocean Breeze so that it could set off for England and cross the busy waterway before darkness.

Despite all the challenges, enduring the natural forces of the channel as part of a relay team turned out to be fun and a great victory.

But I still don’t understand why so many people try solo swims, a far more daunting test of the human spirit. Maybe, like so many athletes, they simply have unusual strength and willpower.

Sometimes, even they go too far, however.

Consider the daring Webb.

Even before his channel swim, he had been praised for jumping off a steamship in Russia during a gale in an unsuccessful effort to save a crewman washed overboard into bitterly cold waters.

But soon after his channel crossing, Webb’s fame began to fade.

So at age 35, he tried a daredevil maneuver that proved too much: swimming through surging rapids and a large whirlpool in the Niagara River in New York.

Four days later, his body was found.