After postponing my swim date twice (I was meant to go on Friday, then on Saturday) I/we were getting a little “toey”. The windguru website showed conditions for Sunday a bit blowy at first, but moderating during the course of the day. But Jim Dickson, our skipper, didn’t think it was suitable for my planned crossing and suggested we postpone until Wednesday (a local channel swimmer, Mike Spalding, has a swim booked for Monday/Tuesday). But that would only leave us a few days to do my swim before flying home, and would also restrict our tourist type activities. So we decided to go for my swim on Sunday March 15th.

After getting up at 4.00am (again!), we drove round to Lahaina to meet up with Jim for a 6.00am departure. The crew would be compact to say the least. Jim driving the boat, Penny handling/feeding and myself in the water. We motored along the West Maui coast in the pre dawn toward our starting point at Kapalua. At one point, we had a couple of humpback whales surface less than 50 metres from the boat (we have seen maybe a hundred of them this last week, as they come to these waters each year at this time to give birth and nurture their young). Man, it would be nice to swim with these creatures.

After gearing up, I hit the water at 7.01am, touched the rocks at Hawea Point and was away. The first leg on my swim was across the Pailolo Channel which seperates Maui from Molokai, a straight line distance of around 8.8 miles or 15 klm. My swim course was roughly WNW and we had a southerly breeze of around 15 knots at the start, so I received a small amount of assistance, not unlike swimming to Rottnest from Cottesloe, when you swim in a westerly direction and have a (normally) SE breeze. This was true open water and the swell was a good 6 foot/2 metres. I never saw anything going across except for the indigo void below me, although Penny said there were heaps of whales in the vicinity, the closest of which came to within a 100 metres of me.

After 3 hours 45 minutes of swimming, I could see the bottom and was only a klm or so from land. Now we changed course down along the Molokai coast, heading in a SW direction. Jim said there was normally a good current in close which would assist in pushing me along the coast. But today it never eventuated. We were heading 2 1/2 miles/4 klm along the coast to a harbour which provided a safe landing spot. Not sure of the name of the harbour, and without any assistance from the current, I was punching into the headwind. The breeze had now dropped to 10 knots (with a rain squall every so often) and had switched to SW, so I was going straight into it. After 1 hour 45 minutes of that, an old shoulder problem was starting to flare up so I decided to call it quits after touching dry land at Molokai. I had originally hoped to then swim across to Lanai, or as a plan b), to swim back to Maui. But whichever option I chose, I would still have at least another 6 to 8 hours of swimming into the wind.

I thought finishing in good shape was the smarter option, rather than causing major damage to my shoulder, when we have entered to swim the Manhattan Island Marathon in only 11 weeks from now. My final swim time was 5 hours 41 minutes and I had covered 11.3 statute miles/18 klms. Whilst the Pailolo Channel is one of the shorter ones on offer in Hawaii, it is still a challenging crossing. I would rate it equal to Rottnest, in Western Australia. Despite the magnificent conditions for open water swimming in Hawaii, it is amazing how few people have swum these waters (apart from the annual Maui Channel Swim which goes from Lanai to Kaanapali, on Maui). I was only the 19th person (and the first Australian) to swim the Pailolo Channel.

No more posts to the website for me for the next week. I’m going to party. All the best to our growing following of readers. And like any of our swims, if you want some more information to help plan a crossing in Hawaii, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Chris

This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 9:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.