Atlantic Swim

Woman claims record Atlantic swim Elementary

Woman, 56, claims record Atlantic swim

2 But her business manager said yesterday that some days the seas were so stormy that Figge could not get into the water and had to stay on board the catamaran which went with her on her long journey. “She swam 19 of 24 days,” said David Higden. “It changed from an endurance swim to an extreme adventure swim. She didn’t get into the water as much as she wanted, because the waves were so high. The weather was so bad that it was difficult for the crew to see her in the water.” 3 Figge did not respond to requests for comment. In her defence, Higden said she had never planned to swim the whole way. “Nobody could swim across the Atlantic. It’s physically impossible,” he said. “It would take years.” In his reply he did not say how many nautical miles Figge actually swam during her crossing. A week after she began, Higden announced on Figge’s Facebook page that storms forced her to change course. She finally landed at Trinidad, 1,000 miles from her planned destination, the Bahamas. 4 Figge first started doing endurance challenges in her 30s when her 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, her son is a

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She said the inspiration for the Atlantic swim was a turbulent transatlantic flight and also Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926. Figge said she had a picture of Ederle on board the catamaran. “We are the same in many ways,” she said. “She wore a red hat and she was of German origin. We both talk to the sea, and neither of us wanted to get out of the water.”

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For safety she made the journey inside a steel and plastic fibre cage fixed to the back of a catamaran with a crew of engineers, a doctor and a diver. There was an electro-magnetic device in the cage to keep sharks away. She didn’t see any sharks during her swim but she did see whales, turtles and dolphins.

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Figge planned to swim to the Bahamas, but on January 21 Higden wrote an update on Facebook: “Strong winds and ten-metre waves have caused problems for the boat and for Jennifer’s swimming. They have to follow a different route, where there is better weather. The catamaran is going south.” She arrived at Chacachacare Island in Trinidad on 5 February. “The storm changed everything,” Higden said. “She had to make some changes to her plans.”

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Benôit Lecomte of France holds the record for swimming the Atlantic in 73 days in 1998; he travelled the 3,716 miles from Cape Cod to Brittany himself, but a boat went with him. He swam for six hours per day. He had no cage but a device with a 25ft electro-magnetic field to protect him. © Guardian News & Media 2009 First published in The Guardian, 09/02/09

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1 A 56-year old American woman has swum across a large part of the Atlantic Ocean inside a six metre by four metre cage which protected her from sharks. Jennifer Figge, an athlete from Aspen, Colorado, said she took nearly a month to swim from the Cape Verde Islands to Trinidad, crossing 2,000 miles of ocean.

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Month-long feat in shark tank pulled by catamaran • Storm blew extreme sport enthusiast far off course Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington Monday 9 February, 2009

racing driver, and she has covered 3,000 miles on foot, and more than twenty sea crossings. On her list of achievements, she says she ran 180 miles across Mexico in 1995 – including the final 60 miles with a plaster cast on her left leg.

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