Two Women, Three Rivers, 20 Bridges, Nine Hours and 15 Minutes
At 7:30pm on Saturday, June 23, a pair of British women stepped aboard a small motorboat in North Cove Marina, and were ferried out to a point just beyond Pier A. There, Laura Reineke and Lee Saudan dove off the bow of the vessel and began a nine-hour, counterclockwise swim around Manhattan, in the East, Harlem, and Hudson Rivers.
Ms. Reineke, the founder of Henley Mermaids, a group that sponsors long-distance swims by its members, recalls, “our first sensation was nervousness. New York Harbor is one of the busiest in the world, and the water was really rough. The Staten Island Ferry, which was just a short distance in front of us, was about to take off, and we had been warned that they stop for nobody.”
“The chop was not the kind you experience in normal ocean swimming,” observes Ms. Reineke, who freestyled her way across the English Channel in last year. “Usually, even in heavy seas, you experience a kind of rhythmic wave. But in New York, there are bow waves from vessels and shocks from speedboats coming at you from all directions.”
Both Ms. Reineke and Ms. Saudan were escorted by kayakers. “The rules are very strict,” she says. “You are not allowed to touch the boat or hold onto it and rest. They can feed you, but only liquid that comes through a tube suspended from a fishing line.” (These procedures, along with all the outfitting, equipment, and official permissions are looked after by a local non-profit, New York Open Water.)
“I was seasick for the first six hours,” she recalls. “The East River was choppy and the tide was fighting us. But by the time we got to the Harlem River, the water smoothed out quite a bit, and I was feeling better.” She notes, “each of the three rivers has a distinct taste. They are all brackish, which means they are less salty than seawater, but still not fresh. But there was a different level of salinity in each. And the Harlem River has a distantly fishy, unpleasant taste.”
“Swimming at night in unknown waters can be daunting,” she admits. “We had taken the Circle Line a few days earlier, so we would know what to expect, what to look out for, and which of the 20 bridges that connect to Manhattan were coming at what points. But you don’t get to see everything when your head is just above water.”
“The most striking change was from the Harlem River to the Hudson,” she remembers. “The tide at Spuyten Duyvil literally catapults you from the Harlem River, which is very narrow at that point, into the Hudson, which is just immense and vast.” Turning left into the Hudson marked mile 16, or slightly more than halfway toward their goal of closing the loop and being picked up at Pier A.
The worst moment, she says, “came when a Jet Ski operator moving at high speed with no lights on came straight for us in the dark. My escort positioned his kayak sideways in front of Lee and me, and shone a light directly into his eyes. That got his attention, but our escort was putting his life in danger to protect us. That Jet Ski could easily have killed all of us.”
As she and Ms. Saudan cruised downstream along the Hudson, Ms. Reineke realized that they were going to make it, and her mind began to wander to upcoming goals. “The English Channel and the Twenty Bridges swim around Manhattan are two legs of what open-water swimmers call the Triple Crown,” she explains. “The third part is the San Pedro Channel, which separates the mainland of California from Catalina Island. That’s my next milestone. Once I have achieved that, I will be one of only three British women over the age of 50 to have done so.”
“After Catalina,” she says, “I’d like to start working on the ‘Ocean Seven’—open-water channel swims, such the North Channel, which separates Northern Island from Scotland, and then the Strait of Gibraltar.”
By the time they emerged from water, around 5am on Sunday, Ms. Reineke and Ms. Saudan had clocked 28.5 miles in nine hours and 15 minutes of non-stop swimming, which puts their average speed at just over three miles per hour.
The women undertook their marathon swim to raise money for WildFish.org, a charity that seeks to reverse the decline of wild fish populations and their habitats, worldwide. Their effort netted roughly 6,500 British pounds (or almost $8,500) for this cause. In their years of sponsored swims, Ms. Reineke estimates that the Henley Mermaids have raised roughly 120,000 pounds (or slightly more than $150,000) for various non-profit organizations.
Asked about her training methodology, Ms. Reineke reflects, “it’s very simple, really. I just swim—plop me in and I go.”