Swimming to Catalina

Four athletes try consecutive crossings of Catalina Channel

Comments (0) By Gendy Alimurung Thursday, Jan 6 2011

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Stomach tied in knots, muscles cramping, Vovk swims his heart out for eight hours, midnight to daylight. But it's no use. He barely makes it seven and a half miles. In mild weather, he might have covered twice that much in the same time. But in the storm of the season, it's one stroke forward, 10 strokes back the whole way. Exhausted, hypothermic, he curls up into a ball. He isn't aware of giving up exactly, of making a decision to stop paddling, to stop throwing arm over arm, shoulder over shredded shoulder. As he begins to sink, he feels hands pulling him out of the water.

Consciousness is a funny thing; asked about it later, Vovk will remember the ridiculous smell of bacon wafting over from the escort boat yards away — someone was cooking onboard. He will remember staring up at the crest of black waves in between lightning flashes. He will remember begging to be told how to keep going despite the nausea and pain. He won't remember precisely what happened after a person from the boat jumped in and yanked him from the sea.

PHOTO BY JENNIE WARREN

Ready, set, paddle! Chris Dahowski, left, David Hartmire, Jen Schumacher and Mike Vovk take to the sea.

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"There was crying," he recalls uncomfortably. "I was crying."

Now it's four days after the swim. No history was made. But personally, this was the first thing Vovk couldn't finish. Personally, Vovk has worked his way through upset, shame and disappointment in record time. Now he's pissed.

Quietly, without media fanfare, without crowds of well-wishers standing on shore, before the benefits of his intensive cardiovascular and strength training diminish, he charters a guide boat. "We were just waiting for your call," his teammates say when he tells them his plan.

The weather on Vovk's "revenge swim" couldn't be lovelier. Faster and faster he goes. Although Hartmire, Schumacher and Dahowski have completed their respective crossings on the first go-round, they swim the final two miles with him. They finish as a foursome, and it's emotional, and Vovk becomes the 199th person to swim across the Catalina Channel in 80-plus years.

"There's a reason that number is so low," Vovk says. "Swimming that channel? It's freakin' hard."

He would like to never do it again.