By Chance Gusukuma
Watching a pod of open-ocean swimmers stroke offshore triggers an amphibious instinct deep down in some of us. Especially in Hawaii, there’s a strong temptation to peel off our daywear and pad down from dry land into the warm waters lapping up onto a sun-kissed beach.
From dawn to dusk, people swim along a placid, half-mile stretch at Ala Moana Beach Park. Others swim past a windsock at Kaimana (Sans Souci) Beach and keep going into the waters off Waikiki. On the Windward side, swimmers frequent the waters off Kailua Beach and Lanikai, with more experienced swimmers venturing out to Flat Island or the Mokulua islands. During the summer, there’s a popular North Shore race series. And swimmers come from far and wide to compete in the venerable Waikiki Roughwater Swim, a 2.4-mile race that turns 40 this Labor Day.
Talk to ocean swimmers long enough, and you’ll ask yourself why you don’t take the plunge into Island waters more often.
Take Linda Kaiser and Laurie Foster, for example. Kaiser, 58, has completed seven – seven! – channel swims between the main Hawaiian Islands, four of them with Foster and Mike Spalding. They’ve braved roiling currents, physical and mental exhaustion, and one incident in which Kaiser swallowed something – a jellyfish, she guesses – that turned her insides out and made her feel “like I wanted to die.”
Even experienced swimmers stay out of the water when box jellyfish or Portuguese men-of-war roll in. But they dismiss that haunting Jaws orchestral score and the disturbing imagery it conjures up. “People watch too many movies,” scoffs Kaiser.
Swimmers enjoy communing with fishes, turtles, and other ocean life. Dolphins are rarer, but on occasion, “you’ll be swimming, and all of a sudden, there’ll be a pod of dolphins on you and it’s unbelievable,” says Foster, 52, president of the Waikiki Swim Club. “That’s just the highlight of the year.”
You probably should worry more about your fellow man than sea creatures. Ocean swimmers wear colorful swim caps so they’re visible amid the busy near-shore waterways they share with boaters, paddlers, and standup and traditional surfers.
Top-flight ocean swimming competition can be a full-contact sport. Take it from John Flanagan, a longtime elite swimmer who finished eighth last year in the U.S. Olympic trials after coming out of retirement to attempt to qualify for the inaugural 10-kilometer open ocean swimming event in the Beijing Olympics. With the fierce jockeying for position, “there are blatant poundings in the back of the head and dunkings,” says Flanagan.
Flanagan, Foster and Kaiser all put in serious miles in the pool and ocean to train for long-distance swims and triathlons. But in addition to competition, they also speak of other benefits that they’ve discovered in the water world.
“I do a lot of thinking out there,” says Foster, a management consultant. “If you do long swims, you can really start out thinking about something and pretty much solve it by the time you get in.”
Ocean swimming is “kind of spiritual, meditative and calming,” Kaiser says. “I like the way I feel when I’m in the water. I like the privilege of looking into another world and just being able to be one with something that is totally foreign.”
“It’s just a wonderful escape and a total different look on life,” says Foster.
