An American in her fifties claims she is the first woman to swim the Atlantic, after propelling herself across thousands of kilometres of ocean in a 6m by 4m shark cage.
Jennifer Figge (56) an endurance athlete from Aspen, Colorado, said she took nearly a month to make the crossing from the Cape Verde islands to Trinidad.
It was not clear how many nautical miles Figge logged during her crossing. A week after she began, a supporter announced on Figge’s Facebook page that storms had forced her to divert to another course.
The endurance feat got under way on 12 January, with Figge plunging into a regimen of carb-loading and eight-hour days in the water. She ended her journey 1 600km off course, arriving in Trinidad rather than the Bahamas.
But she was exultant. “I wouldn’t have had it any other way,” she told the Associated Press on Sunday.
“I can always swim in a pool.”
Having had a few days on dry land, Figge plans to leave Trinidad on Monday to swim to the British Virgin Islands before returning home.
Her trans-Atlantic crossing was made within the confines of a steel and kevlar shark cage hooked to the rear of a catamaran named Carried Away.
The catamaran had on board a crew of Nasa and Boeing engineers, a doctor, and a diver. A device in the shark cage set off electrical currents to repel predators. She wore an old red T-shirt she considered lucky beneath her wet suit.
In the event, there were no sharks — though among the marine life she did see were a pod of pilot whales, turtles, dolphins, and Portuguese men-of-war.
Her day started at 7am with a breakfast of pasta and baked potatoes, the carbohydrate instalment of a daily 8 000 calories for the duration of the swim. During the rest of the day, the crew aboard the 15m sailboat tossed her bottles of energy drinks. At night, she stocked up on protein: meat, fish and peanut butter.
The distance from Cape Verde to Trinidad is more than 2 100 nautical miles; the plan had been to take two months. Although currents would assist her swim it is not known how much of the total distance was done on the support boat during her rest period.
Figge took up endurance challenges in her 30s when her then seven-year-old son asked her to give up smoking. Her new habit became extreme sports, starting with a run across the state of Iowa.
Twenty years later, the son has grown up to be a racing driver, and she has logged 4 800km on foot, and nearly two dozen maritime crossings.
She has said she was inspired to perform her latest feat by a turbulent transatlantic flight and by Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the Channel, in 1926.
Figge told the AP she kept a picture of Ederle on board. “We have a few things in common,” she said.
“She wore a red hat and she was of German descent. We both talk to the sea, and neither one of us wanted to get out.”
Figge intended to swim to the Bahamas. An update on her Facebook page posted by a friend on 21 January said: “Winds of 25 knots and waves as high as 30 feet have wreaked havoc with their movements and Jennifer’s swimming. They are forced to pursue a different route, in search of more amenable weather. The catamaran is heading south.”
She arrived at Chacachacare Island, an abandoned leper colony, on 5 February.
Benôit Lecomte of France holds the record for swimming the Atlantic. In 1998, he swam 5 945km from Cape Cod to Brittany. It took him 73 days. – guardian.co.uk