Swimming the Strait of Gibraltar: Part I - details

I woke up to a sky filled with pink nimbus clouds that stretched far across the ocean and into the waters beyond. Then again, because don’t think that I slept at all that night, I should simply say that the sunrise on the morning Sunday September 20th was beautiful. It was the last day of summer, and the day that I was set to swim across the Strait of Gibraltar, something that I have been consciously thinking and talking about since I arrived in Spain, two months ago. The swim, which at first seemed like an incredible feat of athleticism, had come to mean something very different for me. While the physical challenge of swimming the Strait and battling the currents and cold waters was still on my mind, and my fear of getting cold tortured me during the days before the swim, swimming the Strait of Gibraltar, more importantly, was the way that I experienced Spain. It had become my identity since I arrived; it was the answer that I gave when people asked me what I was doing here, it was why people over fed me in their homes, or invited me to swim with them…or at least I imagined that my experience here was so shaped by this goal. Moreover, the strange thing about it all is that I hadn’t even swum the Strait. It was as if something, which had never existed, could define who I was. So when the time came for me to traverse Gibraltar, I had to question why I was doing it, for my experience had already been determined by the traverse and the physical challenge no longer seemed all that relevant. It also costs a lot of money to swim the Strait of Gibraltar, around $2,000, and on Saturday, the day before I did my swim, a boat of Moroccan/African immigrants had capsized just off of the Moroccan coast directly in front (to the south) of Tarifa, where the traverse begins. I was actually on the support boat for an American and a Croatian swimmer who were swimming the Strait together. Spanish and Moroccan officials were in the process of recovering bodies and ordered the two swimmers out of the water; otherwise, they would have swum directly through the recovery zone. This also added to me questioning why I was going to swim across the Strait of Gibraltar.

In the end, I swum Gibraltar for a few reasons, none of which seemed all that clear to me at the time (although I am sure that there were what pushed me to do the swim), but mostly I was stuck debating the use of a wetsuit. The reasons for swimming the Strait, however, have all come to light during this post Gibraltar week in Madrid, and I couldn‘t be happier about my decision to swim the Strait. The first reason was that I had been planning to do it since I arrived in Spain, and had been training intensely since I got here, something which has taken a lot of focus and determination. The second, and for me the most important reason, is that I wanted to complete the swim in recognition of the kindness and support that has come my way from the newfound friends in Spain, the people who fed me and helped me to train and encouraged me along the way- I actually felt obliged to do the swim. I also simply wanted to have the luxury of swimming for a really long time in the open ocean, to swim for so long that I could forget about time and even space and just feel the cool expanse of the waters around (and also feel protected by the support boat that accompanied me). And the final reason for swimming across Gibraltar is that I hope to organize a team of Moroccan, Spanish, and American (U.S.) swimmers, and complete a round trip traverse of the Strait as a relay in July of 2010. Completing the swim on my own has given me the confidence and the expertise to organize this swim.

The Strait of Gibraltar is not only the tiny piece of water that separates the European and African continents (as well as the wealth of each country), but it is also the confluence of the waters of the Mediterranean Sea with the Atlantic Ocean. The tides and currents in the Strait are, in blunt, gnarly. Standing on any hill in Tarifa that overlooks Gibraltar, one can clearly see the waters moving via strong currents. Distinct zones within the Strait are visible, defined by what looks like a river of white caps flowing past a body of calm water. Interestingly enough, I was told that the passages of calm waters are actually, where the lateral currents are strongest: the white caps are formed by the wicked winds that persist in the Strait, and the currents can be so strong that they actually tear the white caps apart and calm the waters.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/Strait_of_gibraltar.jpg)

To swim across Gibraltar requires a keen knowledge of the tides and currents of the region. The shortest distance between the point at Tarifa and the African continent is 15km- to Point Cires on the Moroccan coastline (although I’ve heard that it is only 14km or that it is actually 16km). Ideally, you would land at this point, but the currents and the tides are such that this doesn’t happen all that often. The worst place to land would be in Ceuta, which is about 8km to the east of Point Cires and is actually part of Spain; a small Spanish enclave on the African continent. Either if the current pushes you far enough east, because you aren’t swimming fast enough to battle the currents, or because the currents are particularly strong that day, you can potentially end up in Ceuta. Arriving in Cueta is really the last chance to hit land, because if you miss Ceuta, the coastline turns sharply south and you'll never reach the coast, and so the support boat has to take you out of the water. The basic strategy, or the strategy that is most often employed, and that which we used for my swim, was to time the swim for the end of the high tide to take place during the middle of my traverse. This allows for a period of no tidal movement as the high tide recedes into low tide. When the tide is building, lateral currents generally move strongly to the east. When the tide is at bay, there is a period of relatively weak lateral currents. And when the tide is going down, the lateral currents are said to move to the west. Thus, if the changing of the tides takes place at the middle of the traverse, during the first part of the swim the currents would push you to the east, during the mid part you could make good forward progress with relatively weak lateral currents, and during the last part (with the tide going out), the currents would push you back west. Thus, the ultimate trajectory of the swim would be a straight line south from Tarifa to Point Cires, although you would have swim in a sideways V. These are all general patterns, and in large part due to the heavy winds of the region, the Strait of Gibraltar is known to have very erratic currents that defy these patterns.

(http://encarta.msn.com/map_701516790/gibraltar_strait_of.html)

Swimming the Strait of Gibraltar: Part II - swim

I was in the water by 9:30am. The conditions were good, not great, but not bad enough for the captain to call off the swim, and neither am I sure that they would say the conditions in the Strait are ever “good” for swimming, only that they are not “too bad”. I had finally decided to attempt the swim without a wetsuit, a decision that I couldn’t actually make until that very morning. People who know me, especially my swim mer friends, know how cold I can get in the water and may understand my concern. In any case, I attempted to protect myself from the cold with a thick layer of makeshift blubber, consisting of those kilo jugs of lanoline and Vaseline. I basically used the entire mix, meaning that I had about 1.7 kilos of that shit all over my body. Marga and I each put a glove on, and on the small dock of the port in Tarifa with the pink clouds given way to a blue sky, we smothered my body with this magic goo.

I wore three swim caps, a pair of clear Swedish goggles with the bungee-cord strap, and a blue soon to be retired speedo swimsuit. The first two, one green and thin and the other orange of the think latex caps, were given to me during two separate 2.5km swim competitions I had completed, one in Santander and the other in Guadalajara. The third, and most awesome swim cap, was a fading black cap with a giant white B on either side, aka a Bowdoin College swim cap, my alma mater. The blue swimsuit, which is now officially retired, is a suit I picked up in the lost and found pile at Bowdoin and have been wearing for the past 5 months to the point that acquired an awesome hole on each side where the fabric stitched together.

There were two support boats. I left the port of Tarifa in the first boat, captained by Antonio, who's job it was to stay in contact with maritime officials and make sure that we weren’t going to cross paths with any of those huge tankers. This was also the boat that helped me to navigate the currents and chart my path- it was the boat that stayed 200m ahead of me and what I followed through the Strait. The second boat, captained by Charley, was the support boat that stayed close by and gave me food and water whenever I asked. Marga rode in this boat, throwing me food and telling me to keep swimming. Now check this, amazingly enough, Martina Welke, a friend from Bowdoin College who happened to be traveling in Spain during that time, came for the ride on the other navigating boat, along with her travel companion Britta. It was awesome.

Antonio told me to hop off the boat and swim to Point Tarifa- I had to start the swim by touching the European continent first. The water was cold, but felt fresh and not shocking, and I could sense that that layer of blubber was doing some good. I touched the rock, raised my hand to the sky, put my face in the water, and st arted to swim. And from then on out, nothing really changed. I simply swam, and swam, and swam some more until I hit land on the other side of the Strait.

The water temperature changed dramatically throughout the swim, something that I had been warned of by the American swimmer who traversed the day before. The first 5km or so from the Spanish coast towards the Moroccan, the water was really cold, about 16-17 degrees C or about 62 degrees F. I basically sprinted through this region and was very thankful to have been warned of the changing water temperature beforehand- it really helped me to plan my swim. Suddenly, however, without warning or a gradual change, the water temperature rose dramatically to about 20-21degrees C, or 69 degrees F, which made a huge difference. Arriving at the Moroccan coast, the water temperature dropped to what it was leaving Spain, but I was so close to land that I wasn’t at all fazed by the cold.

I listened attentively to my body throughout the swim, making sure that my body temperature didn’t drop too low. My concern was that if it did, even if I put the wetsuit on I wouldn’t be able to get warm swimming. At times, I felt like I would need to put the wetsuit on, but then I would just keep on swimming, and swimming. I only stopped a few times, each for no more than a minute. At first Marga would tell me how far I had swum, and then started to tell me how many kilometers were left. I drank water each time, and tried to eat some dates and bananas, but didn’t feel hungry and the sweet fruits mixed with the salty sea didn’t help my lack of an appetite.



Fatigue wasn’t a huge issue during the swim. Of course, I was tired by the end, but I never felt like my arms were heavy or that my muscles were cramping. I think that I trained well. The swell and ocean chop are what I remember feeling most during the swim, and at times the warm sun on my back and face. It was amazing how much the character of the ocean changed throughout the Strait. Leaving Spain, the ocean was rough with large rounded swells that picked me up to catch a glimpse of the land, water and boats around, and than dropped me into the abyss of only the sea. Other times, which were few, the ocean was as calm as a lake and I could feel myself gliding through the water, breathing tranquilly to both sides and enjoying the peace. And when the wind picked up about half way through the swim, the water turned to a mix of medium swell and a choppy white cap filled ocean that kept with me until I landed. What I loved most when the oce an behaved as this, was how the white caps would often crash over my body and I could feel the bubbles of white wash over my sky, in the middle of the ocean.

There were a few incredibly powerful visual moments during the swim. One was watching the Moroccan coast become ever clearer in the horizon, as the faded browns turned to defined shapes of hillsides and rocks. Another was seeing the huge cargo ships or oil tankers in the water around me. I never got too close to them, but seeing the boats from the waters view reminded me of the oceans expanse. It was as if I had to see something so much bigger than me to be reminded of the profundity of the ocean. And a much more subtle but more constant image that I will always retain from the swim are the colors of the waters below me, and how I was mystified when I saw the turquoise wate r so familiar to the coast reappear as a jaunting reminder of what I had just crossed.

It took me 3.5 hours to swim across the Strait of Gibraltar. In the end, the currents didn’t play out as projected, and I landed at Perejil, a rock formation between Point Cires and Ceuta, covering a distance from Tarifa of about 19km. What happened was that instead of the current changing direction from the east to the west when the tide began to go out, it continued to push east. What I find most funny about my traverse is that Perejil, or la Isla de Perejil, actually belongs to Spain. It is a giant rock that I’ve been told is connected to Morocco during low tide. There was a small war between Spain and Morocco about 10 years ago over possession of the island- it was historically Spanish, and then Morocco put their flag on the island, and so Spain had to come and do something about it. Nobody lives there; it is nothing but a large rock. When I arrived, hundreds of gulls took to the sky and squawked the familiar squawk of gulls on the move. I imagined, however, that there were squawking “Welcome to Morocco”, or maybe they said Spain.

Anyways, if you take notice in the video below, as soon as I arrived on the rock, I was told to get off. I think of Perejil as a no-mans-land, neither Moroccan or Spanish, and by no-man I mean that nobody is really allowed there, I guess the exception would be if you swum there, but even then I only had a about 3 minutes of glory before I jumped back into the water, swam to the support boat and got a ride to Tarifa.

Madrid to Gibraltar

I left Madrid sprinting through the red light district carrying a plastic bag with a kilo tub of lanoline and another of Vaseline, listening to the fading hisses of prostitutes behind me. It was my last preparatory stop as I left the capital for about a week of travels that I was hoping would culminate in me swimming across the Strait of Gibraltar. I had spent the previous week in Madrid, swimming my ass off at this amazing 50m pool called Pio XII in the north of the city. The pool was relatively empty for most of the late morning and I was able to perfect the 8000meter freestyle set I’ve come to call The Aztec Pyramid. During the evening, I would go with Margarita and others to a different pool, Las Rozas, that was cold and 25m long. It was nice to do a smaller set at night and get back into the water after the mornings of hard training. I was also trying to stuff the final reserve calories into my body that I believed would help to keep me warm while swimming across Gibraltar, and found myself buying boxes of ice-cream sticks and eating them all, or blocks of cheese, tons of cured meats, bread and whatever else I could get my hands on- I was an amazing gourmand. I pieced together a few other things as well, and Margarita and I left Madrid on Friday the 11th with her red Peugot station wagon packed full.

We traveled to the north of Spain before we went to the south, as if a long road-trip through Spain was an essential prelude to swimming across the Strait. We wanted to spend some time amongst the waves, cool waters, and green countryside of northern Spain, and compete in a 2.5km swim across the bay of Santander. Northern Spain reminded me a lot of Humboldt County by how the conifers touch the very lips of the cliffs and the ocean churns below, and in fact the geography of Spain reminds me a lot of California as a whole: green and rainy in the north, and hot and dry in the south. We both finished eighth in the competition, I finished eighth overall and Margarita finished eighth out of the females, but were both swimming really fast. I, at least, felt like I was sprinting a whole 2.5km, but didn’t finish as well as I did in the competitions in Guadalajara, nor did Margarita. The level of open water swimming was higher in the north of Spain than in central Spain, we decided.

I hid the tubs of Vaseline and lanoline behind the drivers seat and tried to forget my fear of getting cold while swimming across the Strait. But every time we unpacked the car to move from one campsite to another, or searched the vehicle for our goggles or towel as we disembarked to another beautiful beach, I would instinctually pick up the tubs of grease to make sure that they were still there, open them, even smell them, and question whether these mixed together would create that layer of blubber I have always dreamt of. Marga would catch me and remind me to no pensarlo, but this great unknown and deep fear of swimming the Strait without a wetsuit and getting too cold to continue kept resurfacing, and not only with those tubs of grease, but every time I thought of the swim. I wasn’t sure how I would do the swim, either in a wetsuit or without, until the very morning that I set off to swim towards Morocco.

We drove from the Cantabria Sea of northern Spain to Seville, the capital of Andalusia, on Tuesday the 15th. Everybody told us that it would be such a long drive, but it was much shorter than any of the many times I’ve traversed the length of California either on a Greyhound bus or with some member of my family. I was reminded, again, that the American conception of space is much different than the European. You can drive across Spain in a 8 hours and in California you’ll only get from San Diego to San Francisco. And for Americans, spending 8 hours in a car is somewhat of a normal road trip, while in Spain it would be excessive or a paliza.

Margarita’s aunt Incarnacion and her uncle Ignacio welcomed us into their home that night and showed us around Seville the next day. The city was beautifully vibrant and full of orange trees and jasmine vines and reminded me of Tunis. I saw myself there for more than the day we spent, and it seems like I’ll be returning there to talk with officials in Andalusia about the possibility of getting financial and media support from them for the swim I’m trying to put together for next year; the Moroccan, Spanish and American team of swimmers that will cross the Strait of Gibraltar twice as a relay.

Arriving in Tarifa, the southern most town of peninsular Spain, I took a big sigh of relief to be in the place that I had been imagining for so long. Tarifa looks directly onto to the Strait of Gibraltar, with the Mediterranean on one side and the Atlantic on the other. Strong winds prevail in this region, which make it the mecca of kite and wind surfing. Tarifa is actually a strange, but vibrant, mix of surf culture and a town lost between two places- like a gas station in the middle of the Arizona desert, flashing bright neon lights out of the expanse of red rock. They say that the winds are so strong in Tarifa that the people from there have been driven slightly crazy. I found that the people there very nice and not crazy.

We stayed at a nice camping center right on the coast about 6km north of Tarifa, secluded from the winds my a grove of coastal pines scattered throughout the campsite. The site was really nice, with hot showers and clean bathrooms, and also very close to town. We had arrived on Wednesday afternoon, and on Thursday morning I met with Rafael, the owner/director of Associacion Cruce a Nado Estrecho del Gibraltar. Rafael is a busy man that, alongside organizing this international swim, he also runs a whale watching service. Our meeting was brief, and he basically said that the conditions to swim the strait were not very good and that the earliest possible day to swim the strait was Saturday, however there was an American and a Croatian swimmer that were waiting to cross, and if they went on Saturday, then I would swim on Sunday. So Margarita and I spent the next few days touring the region, going on long walks along the Atlantic coast amongst shore bound algae and the ever present sight of Morocco across those waters. It was crazy and intense to have the African continent on that horizon and to be thinking constantly that I would be swimming there in just a few days. At times the shore seemed close and assessable, but when the winds picked up in the late afternoon, the horizon filled with a faint cloud layer that made the shore look infinitely far away. In the end, I was thinking about the swim too much. I was worried that I wouldn’t complete it because I felt like I had all of Spain supporting me and didn’t want to fail. Swimming in the windblown waters helped to cool my nerves.