THE CUBA SWIM:
TEN YEARS LATER
A Reflection
My Head Handler through all the grueling years of training, Bonnie Stoll, who had been in my sightline every stroke as I breathed to the left for the 52 hrs, 54 mins, of the swim was in a virtual dance with me, through the throng of fans who had come to witness the moment in history. Bonnie inched her way backwards, with me dazed and off balance, following her to dry land, as the rules of the sport state. Two protective lines formed on either side of me, yelling out “Don’t touch her.” They had been informed that I needed to make my way on my own to terra firma before the official clock would stop.
Then there were the jellyfish. Honestly, these put me into a state of fear much more so than sharks. There are thousands of species of jellyfish and I’ve been stung by quite a few. The Portuguese Men of War, for instance, are no picnic. Besides the pain of the initial sting, you can experience slight anaphylactic shock and nausea. But nobody has ever died from stings from these animals. Certain species of the box jellyfish, can emit a fatal sting.
We brought world renowned box expert, Dr. Angel Yanagihara, from the U. of Hawaii, onto our team. Angel helped develop a suit legal for me to wear (no buoyancy nor warmth to it), plus a silicone mask, surgeon’s booties and gloves. All this gear made swimming through the nights (the jellyfish only dangerous at dusk and into the night) very arduous, but after nearly dying in 2011 after swimming into a swarm of box, the gear was the innovation answer for my being able to swim through these deadly little boxes, each one no bigger than a sugar cube.
This mission took on life values for me that resonated far deeper than an endurance sporting event. Values such as the courage to fail. The mathematical prediction had always been failure. This mission would require the will to drill down to every ounce of potential within. No concessions on any training swim. If Bonnie and I set out, usually in either St. Maarten or Mexico or Key West, to get in 16 hours one day, we never allowed ourselves to leave it short, even at 15 hours, 58 minutes. The research had to be at an exhaustive level. How to enter the realm of the potentially fatal box again? How to predict the counterclockwise eddies in the Stream? How to keep the bloody gashes of neck chafing, from the salt rubbing, from causing so much blood over this long period that the scent might attract sharks?
by Diana Nyad
It was ten years ago, September 2, 2013, that I at long last stumbled up onto Smathers Beach in Key West, on the fifth try over thirty-five years, after swimming across that epic ocean between Cuba and Florida.
As life happens to all of us, much has been going on with me over these last ten years. Memoir written, off-Broadway play performed, speaking engagements far and wide, family and friend experiences….Bonnie and I traveling to new lands, such as Egypt and Antarctica. Bonnie and I also founded our non-profit EverWalk, to mimic our nature bonding out in the ocean now through walking.
I truly don’t want to sit around eating chocolates and looking back at Cuba Swim footage for the rest of my life. But it is the tenth anniversary after all, and that has brought me to a place of casting back to the inspiration of it all in the first place.
The vision of that crossing literally entered my imagination at the age of nine. My childhood was spent frolicking in the ocean off Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and when the Cuban Revolution erupted in 1959, Cuba became a looming place of mystique to all of us in south Florida. That island we knew so well overnight became forbidden to all U.S. citizens. I remember it to this day. I was on the beach with my mother when I was nine, searching the horizon for a glimpse of Cuba. My mom pointed out across the sea and said to me: “There. Havana is right out there. It’s so close that you, you little swimmer, you could actually swim there.”
The thought of swimming all that way never left me. When I became an open water swimmer of note in my 20s (the 1970s), holding records for such swims as the speed record for circling Manhattan Island (Oct 6, 1975---7hrs, 57mins), the Cuba Swim turned to obsession.
There was the enticing history of the actual geography. And there were the myriad, and in some ways dangerous, obstacles to getting across. Some have called this swim “The Mount Everest of Swims”. There’s the sheer distance, over 100 miles in the open ocean. This would on paper require two-to-three days of non-stop swimming. Then add in the challenge of a swimmer averaging just over 2mph, with a destination of due north, needing to cross a powerful Gulf Stream current that flows due east to northeast at over 6mph. Then add in swirling circular countercurrents that wouldn’t take a swimmer under, but would take them into its circle and not allow escape back to swimming north.
And we can’t underestimate the danger of the sharks of the tropics. These are the oceanic whitetips, the lemons, the tigers. True that they would mostly be curious and not attack. But marine biologists told our team that an animal 50 or so miles from shore, with no bait fish on near reefs to feed from, may not have eaten for a week or more when an innocent swimmer comes splashing across the surface, making a low-frequency vibration that signals dying fish, dinner bell. We developed a two-pronged shark safety protocol. One, kayakers near me deployed Shark Shields, an antenna that emits an electric blip at a frequency that bothers a shark’s sonar system. Two, brave divers would take turns scouting beneath me, especially at night, ready to poke a shark in the snout if it came too close to me.
My first attempt was 1978, age 28. The weather is tough to predict in this stretch across the FL Straits. So many factors from so many directions push the Gulf Stream into an unfavorable vector. The trade winds, coming from the east all the way across the Atlantic from Africa make impossible high waves as they bump across the east-flowing Stream. We had a good forecast but it quickly fell apart and we were in roiling seas for 41hrs, 49mins, finally giving it up for a better day.
That better day came in August, 2011, 33 years later. I had left my Cuba dream behind at age 30 and gone into a career of broadcast and print journalism. At age 60, the itch to chase the big dream that was always deep within surfaced and the expedition was revived. Our team tried twice in 2011 and once more in 2012, each time thwarted by Mother Nature on steroids.
About two hours from Smathers Beach, on our way to the finish that day, I asked our genius navigator John Bartlett and Bonnie to pull our boats into a semicircle. I addressed our 40-person crew. I thanked them for their loyalty. For their intelligence. For their perseverance. The truth is that WE, all of us, succeeded in that crossing.
As does every one of life’s imposing endeavors, it’s never one person who succeeds alone.
Post swim, there was controversy among other marathon swimmers. Questions as to whether I really did complete the swim. As a matter of fact, that controversy continues to this day. We followed all the basic tenets of fair swims, meaning I never exited the water, never held onto any boat or person to gain flotation aid, never was propelled or pulled forward in any way. We were also apprised by the then head of the World Open Water Swimming Association that there were swims, due to various safety issues, that were fair and legal outside the standard English Channel Swimming Association rules. By those standards, no touching of the swimmer is allowed.
The protection against the box jellyfish on this swim, especially after the severe stings I survived in 2011, required Bonnie shoring up the exposed ankle and wrist skin, after some tentacles had stung me when the legs of the suit rode up a bit. I held each leg, then each arm, up and tread water while Bonnie wrapped the ankles and wrists with duct tape. I never held onto the boat for this operation.
In the 2013 successful crossing, I did pull the legs and arms of the stinger suit on, on my own, before dusk both nights. This took considerable effort, pulling the material up, inch by inch. Then I did receive assistance from my shark divers and from Bonnie to tug up the final inches that I simply couldn’t do, and to pull the zipper up in the back. This did require what you would call some upward movement, in the tugging, but there was no moment any aid in flotation nor in forward movement. After the literal near-death stings of 2011, our team was adamant about securing coverage of
every millimeter of skin. I would not be hyperbole to say I could have/should have died in 2011. In 2013, I worked with a face prostheticist to develop a silicone mask, to prevent tentacles from stinging me on the face. This was extremely difficult to swim with, the mouth opening, tough to maneuver, but I never would have come back for a fifth attempt without 100% skin coverage.
And Bonnie would have me turn around on feeding stops, when the back of the neck was starting to severely chafe. Again, this application, which I could not do on my own without jeopardizing thick goo on my goggles, wouldn’t have been necessary on a shorter swim. But in this case, in the end almost 53 hours, that chafing would have produced enough blood to possibly attract sharks. Again, I tread on my own stream. Neither Bonnie nor anybody else held me up to get that swab across the back of the neck.
I looked into so many eyes. Some were my beloved forty teammates, many of whom had given their expertise and their valuable time through the four years of our training and previous attempts. None had received any financial compensation. We were all in this dream together, in the name of grand adventure, of making history, of sealing lifelong friendships.
And in the eyes of those I didn’t know, I saw hope. I saw the longing for the conviction that if we all of us just refuse to give up, we will conquer our challenges, we will achieve our aspirations.
With swollen lips and abrasions throughout the mouth, from the salt and sun exposure, I spoke three messages on that beach that day ten years ago.
One, We should never ever give up.
Two, We’re never too old to chase our dreams.
Three, It looks like a solitary sport but it takes a team.
The earth is some 4/5 water. Open water swimmers have both long-established swims in oceans, lakes and rivers that draw them, and they have swims that nobody has ever tried. For me, the one that captured my heart and soul was always Cuba.
There was the clear political history, the image of swimming from one country to another. When I was invited to meet with President Obama in the Oval Office after the 2013 swim, President Obama said something to me akin to “You have shown us the way to reconnecting our two nations.” And during Obama’s peace tour of Cuba in 2014, when I was invited to be part of his entourage, we heard in Raúl Castro’s speech to the Cuban people there (again to paraphrase): “If the champion swimmer Diana Nyad can swim through the sharks to connect our two countries, surely we can make that connection ourselves.
By the English Channel rules, these minor moments of touching are not allowed. We didn’t do this swim under English Channel Rules. But we certainly made it shore to shore under the umbrella understanding that no exit from the water, no flotation aid, no forward propulsion aid was used.
WOWSA at the time of my swim, 2013, was not in the business of certificates of ratification. I was never contacted by an auspices of the sport to tell me where I needed to submit our documentation. We had two Independent Observers, not members of our team, who tag-teamed and each was perched right above me on the boat next to me, Voyager. They took careful notes of everything they observed and wrote testimonial letters, along with their logs, that I never exited, nor had help in flotation nor forward propulsion. The Observers submitted their comprehensive logs to WOWSA within 24 hours of completing the swim.
Many of the key crew members, such as Dr. Yanagihara, wrote their own testimonial letters to the same effect. There is no logic in forty people bearing witness to something, all saying I did it by the rules they understood to be the most important, and having any doubt otherwise.
In 2022, WOWSA did commission a comprehensive report on my swim, the most comprehensive in the history of the sport. At the end of long pages of proof specifications, this was their conclusion: ‘Based on the evidence, it’s logical to conclude that Diana Nyad entered the water at 8:58:46 AM CDT (UTC-4) on August 31, 2013 from Marina Hemingway (23”05’06.4” N 82”30’14.5”W) on the shore of Havana, Cuba and exited the water at 1:54:18.6 PM EDT (UTC-4) on September 2, 2013 at Smathers Beach (24”33’03.6N 81”46’24.6W) on the shore of Key West, Floria. There is no known evidence that she exited the water or gained forward momentum from a support vessel or other object or person during the swim.’
I was out of the sport for more than 30 years when I came back to try Cuba again. Whereas back in the 70s when I swam on the Marathon Circuit, I was friends with the others who traveled from Italy to Canada to Argentina for the various races. This time I didn’t come back to reenter the sport. I came back to finally achieve the one swim that was most important to me. My Holy Grail, if you will. I wish I knew Sarah Thomas when she did her astounding four-way crossing of the English Channel. She is a hero, to me and to all the marathon swimming community. Her name should be known by sports fans and sport journalists and the world at large. Sarah is an icon of our time and I admire her profoundly. Along with others. Jaimie Monahan’s remarkable 40-hour 4-time circling of Manhattan Island blows my mind. Past and present, open water swimmers have accomplished stunning things and I applaud them. Sincerely.
Sarah Thomas above & Jaimie Monahan below.
I can’t guess why some of those in the sport have doubted our successful crossing but I am here to say to all my fellow swimmers: I made it across that ocean. Fair and square. Shore to shore.
My legacy isn’t so much a mark in the record books. What I hope has bled through to a large population is hope. Hope to believe they can reach any other shore they pursue, whether it be to win their battles against cancer, to rise up from the deep heartache of loss, or to make sure they leave no regrets at their last breath. When I said We Should Never Ever Give Up on Smathers Beach that afternoon ten years ago, I wasn’t speaking to swimmers, or even athletes. I was speaking to all of us, all of us looking to live our lives as large as we possibly can.
Ten years later, that voice is still speaking to me. I may not ever delve into a high-octane experience like that intense training, those four failures, that final triumph again. But I do my best to hit the pillow every night, assured that there was nothing more I could have brought to that day. That was the life lesson of the Cuba Swim to me. To embrace every sunrise, to express curiosity and empathy to every person I meet, to fulfill all my potential, in every aspect of my life. Our team lived by the credo ONWARD! We failed. We got back up, learned from our experience and pressed ever ONWARD!