Swim by Lynn Sherr

Author:Lynn Sherr
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781610390477
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

Go with the Flow

STILL NO RED BALLOONS, at least not from my frog’s-eye view of the sea. I check my watch and realize I’ve been at it for more than forty-five minutes. Will I finish in time if I can’t find the boat? That’s one of the challenges of open-water swimming: without markers, you can’t read distance. The field of blue seems to stretch on forever. And that’s just across. Down is another problem. It’s too deep to see the bottom, maybe three hundred feet beneath me, and there are no lane lines to keep me straight. No walls to push off. Not to mention the fact that I am sharing someone else’s territory, someone who might not be terribly friendly. Someone, or something, that now shows up unexpectedly.

“Yuck!” The fingers of my left hand strike Jell-O—a slimy mass that feels like dessert. I retract my arm like a bullet and peer into the brine: it’s a jellyfish, a transparent, undulating disk some four inches in diameter that, I am relieved to discover, seems equally repelled by me. It scoots away benignly. We’ve all been obsessing about jellyfish, daily discussing the odds of long, poisonous stingers plaguing our route. The boats, we’re assured, carry plenty of vinegar to treat the afflicted. Small consolation. As it turns out, we’re lucky—no purple nasties this day, just these colorless little critters, who intermittently become my companions for the crossing. Half a dozen times my eyes fasten on a small cluster—a class, not a school, of jellies, shimmering in shafts of sunlight. One grander specimen, at least ten inches across, whirls around like a flying saucer. It’s dreamy and makes me smile. Then I refocus.

This is not Leander’s route. For one thing, he swam at night, while we splash across in splendid sun. For another, he, mythologically, shot straight from his home in the ancient Asian city of Abydos to the tower where Hero lived in European Sestos, a distance that used to measure less than a mile, according to the first-century geographer Strabo. Since both cities are long gone, and the coastline has substantially eroded, our journey follows a slightly different path, governed less by myth than by nature.

“There are two sets of currents,” Ahmet told us at the briefing, projecting a giant diagram with unambiguous arrows. “The warm water from the Mediterranean flows north and is pushed under by the cold water from the Black Sea flowing south.” The result: a narrow pair of upward flowing forces along each coast flanking a broader and much faster downward force in the middle. It is too strong to permit a simple, point-to-point crossing, which would only be about a mile. Instead, we are routed along a sweeping arc from the town of Eceabat, on the European side, slightly northeast to compensate for the currents, then southeast along the shore to the finish line at Canakkale, the quiet Asian seaport where we are staying. Canakkale’s main tourist attraction is the gigantic wooden horse used in

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