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Feature: WE ROCKED GIBRALTAR June 23, 2004: WE DID IT! We swam from Europe to Africa, from Spain to Morocco. We arrived in Tarifa on Sunday, June 20. Tarifa is a small town at the very southern tip of Spain. This town is 20 miles west of Gibraltar and 14 km in a straight line from Morocco. In Tarifa, we spoke with Rafael Gutierrez Mesa (the gentleman in charge of the Gibraltar Strait Swimming Association, the association that organizes the crossings, and owner of Turmares, a whale- and dolphin-watching tour company in Tarifa) on Monday, June 21. After telling us that we most likely would be swimming on Saturday, June 26, he showed us wind charts, most often used by windsurfers to select the days with good, strong winds. Tarifa is primarily a wind- and kite-surfing town due to strong winds channeled by the narrowing of the land around the Straits. But a good day for windsurfers is a bad day for swimmers, so we picked from a couple of days that were forecast to have low winds. Tuesday looked good for a crossing, but he already had two Spaniards he was taking across that day. The next window was expected to be Saturday. We went back to the apartment a few blocks from the Turmares shop and the harbor we’d leave from in downtown Tarifa (great location but not exactly quiet—the Spaniards tend to keep late hours) and discussed going on a day trip to Sevilla to pass the time. We´d get in an early swim Tuesday morning, check in with Rafael, then head out. During our morning swim the next morning, we talked about how the swimmer was doing who was already on the way across to Strait. We swam for about an hour in the Mediterranean, rinsed off, and went to Turmares, Rafael´s shop. The weather had changed rather suddenly (typical, apparently, for Tarifa) and we were told we needed at least one swimmer to jump the next morning. In our original plans, we´d figured that Amber would do the swim by herself one day and Heather and Neala would do it together on a different day, or possibly during an advantageous tide later the same day. It became clear, however, that we would risk not having all of us complete the swim if we followed that plan, so we decided to go together. Our idea was that Heather and Neala would be accompanied by one boat and Amber by the other (since that´s the way we´d trained and two boats were provided—an Avon and a 10-person motor boat). We talked to Rafael about our idea, and he assured us that the plan would work out. We went home, ate, made last minute preparations for the swim, sang (none of us should try for a career as a vocalist), and danced to Toto´s "Africa"—our theme song for the swim Then we tried to sleep. Two members of our crew, Eric and Laura, friends from the Bay Area, were arriving via rental car from Jerez de la Frontera, two hours northwest of Tarifa, late Tuesday night. After a long day of traveling—they started out in Boston the day before — they entered our apartment at 1 AM to find a note informing them that they´d need to get up at 4:30 AM. They´re champs, though. They got right up, no complaints. We met Rafael at 5:30 AM, obscenely early for Spain (it sounded like an impromptu Flamenco session started at 1 AM directly under the window of our apartment during the night), and loaded all of our liquids, food, and other paraphernalia onto the boats. Then we met the crews that would take us across. Rafael would monitor our progress from the shop by radio. We´d assumed that Rafael had communicated our plans of having two swimmers with one boat and one swimmer with the other to the crew on the boats, but alas, the Spanish crews found out about it as we were about to start, causing some temporary confusion. Things finally got cleared up once we were already swimming by our crew members communicating in broken Spanish with English with the crew of the boats. It was still dark when we got in the water at 6:20 AM. Fortunately, we´d put lightsticks in our goggle straps so our crews could see us in the water. Because none of the swimmers knew that the crew didn’t know about the splitting up plan, we broke up into our two different groups and swam, assuming that the boats would be with us, ready to guide us if we weren’t on track. However, when we looked up, we couldn’t see our boats and didn’t know where they were as they were still trying to figure out why there were two different groups. After a brief panic, which included several vehement remarks and some choice words and feelings of being lost of the fog like Lynne Cox during her Catalina Island swim, the swimmers and boats found each other again and set off in earnest toward Africa. After a short time we were treated to a beautiful Mediterranean sunrise. Our crews cheered us along, fed us, kept us hydrated, and generally allowed us not to worry about anything but our swim. The swim itself was marvelous. There were swells, about 1 to 2 feet in height, for most of the way across, but they weren´t much of a problem for most of the journey. Some of us were hoping to see whales and dolphins, which frequent the Strait, but we had no such luck. We did, though, see many enormous tankers and at one point some of us were convinced we´d have to race one of them or be crushed. But Our captains kept us out of harm´s way, maintaining contact with all the shipping traffic in the area. After about three hours, we crossed the last shipping lane (they are very organized—further north is the one going west, and just below it is the lane going east) on our route and could swim without worry about that particular menace. We could see the coastline of Morocco getting closer and closer and could make out houses, buildings, and cliffs. In the final 45 minutes the swells got bigger and bigger and became whitecaps. We´d get a big push from one and then find ourselves swimming in place for a little while in the trough. Finally, we were close enough to see the bottom. Currents and high, dangerous waves gave our captain pause, and he decided against landing us on the beach. Our pilots proclaimed our swim successful about 20 meters from the coast of Morocco. We boarded our boats and motored for home. Neala and Heather completed the 14 -mile swim in 4 hours and 36 minutes; Amber in 4 hours and 48 minutes. We actually swam closer to 20 km as one cannot swim in a strait line due to the currents. On the way back we saw the marine life w had hoped to see while swimming. A pod of pilot whales, accompanied by bottlenose dolphins treated us to a show, leaping at close range near us and in front of a tanker. We also saw two sunfish, known as mola mola, whose fins, sticking out of the water as they slowly twirled around, resembled shark fins. When we arrived back at the dock in Tarifa, we were greeted by a welcoming committee that included a Taiwanese man who was planning to swim across in a few days as well as members of the local press. Neala made an effort to befriend the Taiwanese swimmer and went so far as to give him a Dolphin Club swim cap, but he received her overtures in a manner best described as lukewarm. The local journalists, who were more enthusiastic, took our picture and said it would appear as part of an article in Europa Sur. THANK YOU to everyone who supported our efforts—it was
a great swim and experience! |
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