First Female Swims Atlantic at 56

By Outside Online
Feb 10, 2009

Comments (3)

Colorado native Jennifer Figge, age 56, became the first woman to swim across the Atlantic Ocean  Sunday, (The details of this story were incorrectly reported. Figge did not swim the entire way from Cape Verde to Trinidad), completing the trek from Cape Verde Islands to Trinidad in 29 days, according to the Associated Press. Figge was escorted by a sailboat, where she slept at night and tried to replenish the 8,000 calories she burned each day. Some days she swam for as much as 8 hours straight, and her crew would throw her bottles of energy drinks as she swam.

Figge first dreamed of swimming the Atlantic Ocean in the 1960s, when she flew on a particularly stormy transatlantic flight and thought to herself, heck, I could just swim from here. Figge's original plan had her ending at the Bahamas, but she had to veer more than 1,000 miles off course to avoid storms, according to friend David Higdon, who kept in touch with Figge via satellite phone.

Ten years ago, Frenchman Benoit Lecomte swam into history with his 73-day crossing from Massachusetts to France, the first person on record to swim the Atlantic. Figge plans to continue on, after a few days rest, to swim to the British Virgin Islands.

During Figge's journey she saw pilot whales, turtles, dolphins, and a few Portuguese man-of-wars, but there was one animal that stayed on her mind: her dog, an Alaskan Malamute. "It's time for me to get back home to Hank," she told the AP.

--Melanie Lidman

Have thoughts of dogs or special people helped you stay focused on an extreme adventure? Tell us in a comment below.

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Comments

[The Adventure Channel]

Thats what I call one hell of an adventure.
Great that she has accomplished that on her age.

http://theadventurechannel.blogspot.com

[Emma]

I'm amazed by this woman, she puts my 20 minute gym sessions to shame!
People like her make life more fun and colourful.

[Mike Hunt]

Now found to be fake.
http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/beijing/blog/fourth_place_medal/post/The-great-Atlantic-Ocean-swimming-hoax?urn=oly,140525
The great Atlantic Ocean swimming hoax
There were problems with the story from the start. A few of the less-important ones included the fact that Cape Verde is at least 2,400 miles, not 2,100, from Trinidad. And the African islands are about 500 miles off the western coast of the continent, meaning Figge had a huge head start on her trip across the Atlantic. (It'd be like somebody saying they ran across America after starting in Cincinnati.)

Those are trivial though. The real issue stemmed from the fact that swimming 2,100 miles in 25 days is impossible. (Some newspapers picked up on this.) It's infinitely more impossible when somebody only spends 21 minutes swimming during one of those 25 days. Michael Phelps swimming his fastest would take about 20 days to cover that distance. And that's his fastest pace, sustained for three weeks, without ever stopping. Impossible.

Yet, somehow, the AP ran the story even though a few seconds of thought and a pocket calculator was enough to disprove it. They ran a correction yesterday that read, in part:

Figge swam only a fraction of the 2,100-mile journey. The rest of the time, she rested on her crew's westward-sailing catamaran. Her spokesman [said] that her total swimming distance has not been calculated yet, but that due to ocean hazards including inclement weather, he estimates she swam about 250 miles.

Swimming 250 miles is nothing to scoff at; but it's not 2,100. To go back to the running-across-America analogy, this would be like driving cross country with a friend, and getting out of the car every ten miles to run one mile for the entire trip. That'd be an impressive feat, but nobody would eve