With the reality setting in that I really was swimming and in brutal conditions about a thousand nautical miles (x 1.15 for statute miles) from shore east or west in mid north atlantic, I mused that this unlikely scenario was not something I would have willingly ever considered putting on my bucket list. The water to no surprise felt extremely cold and tasted very salty. Each enormous heaving deep ocean swell quickly translated into fast moving surface waves that were impossible to swim against and dangerous to body surf with.
Raised on the north western British mainland coast within sight of the rarely still Irish sea, that sea itself a component of the atlantic, the oceans and their tides, salt and rhythmic pulse have been an essential part of my psyche since childhood. I love the sea. With a full-on Beaufort force eight (39 to 46 mph) westerly gale on the rampage, those of us who had elected to go ahead and swim in the resulting wild conditions pressed on each with our own exciting if beyond the pale challenges.
Quite suddenly an over the top onslaught, perhaps ordered by Neptune himself, had greater minds than all but a stubborn few of us quickly making their exits from the maelstrom. Not very long afterwards, like a boxer’s second when he knows the game is up for his man, the well practiced crew members threw in the towel so to speak by quickly installing cargo nets at each end of the Russian liner’s quite long if narrow pool (by then resembling a wave pool or surf park gone berserk.) One at a time they carefully ‘caught’ us in the nets and helped us out before we likely would have been propelled out, probably with serious injuries. With the pool devoid of swimmers, the crew then very quickly drained it! We learned later that the extreme motion of the pool’s water had been straining the ships steering mechanism to the point of making it difficult to hold course.
It was early May and the ice strengthened Russian owned ‘Alexander Pushkin’ (now British owned, renamed the Marco Polo and running antarctic and other cruises) was on it’s second nine day atlantic crossing of the season. A sister ship two weeks prior had apparently encountered similar albeit seasonally expected westerly gale conditions during which she had hit ‘bergy bits’ – medium to large fragments of ice. Luckily she was undamaged and we were not to encounter any.
Like most of the other passengers, we were immigrants to Canada en-route from London’s Tilbury docks on the river Thames to Montreal on the St Lawrence river. A voyage with many highlights, it is my mid-crossing swim and subsequent close to emergency retrieval via cargo net that stands out for me as the highlight of the crossing. The pool, in contrast to modern cruise ship upper decks location practice, was installed deep in the bowels of the ship presumably to give her a lower centre of gravity and thus greater lateral stability. And yes, the water was pumped in directly from the ocean. We were indeed swimming in north atlantic ocean water.
Transoceanic passenger liners of the era (launched 1966) were built to take the severe conditions we encountered and worse. At 22,000 Gross Tons (the internal volume of a ship) the then Alexander Pushkin was small even by the standards of the day (specifically 1967). The Titanic interestingly was 46,000 GT – for her day (launched 1911) certainly a very large ship. Even larger (100,000 GT to an astonishing 200,000 plus GT) current generation cruise ships in contrast to liners are not designed for severe conditions. They must watch the weather very closely and taking advantage of their designed in much higher speed capabilities, steer clear of predicted extreme weather by running for cover early in the game.
Aboard my 30’ Yamaha sloop sailing out of a marina in West Vancouver, BC Canada, these days I sail the Salish sea – an easterly component of the mighty north pacific ocean laying between Vancouver Island and mainland Canada. Swimming is off either the beach or the anchored boat and not very far from shore!