Night Train Swimmers prepare for a training swim
In How six San Francisco swimmers will conquer the Sea of Cortez part I we left you with a cliffhanger. Where will Night Train Swimmers find a boat?
Enter Bob Buick, owner of San Francisco's oldest restaurant, the Tadich Grill . Buick, a member of the San Francisco Yacht Club in Tiburon heard about Night Train during their weekly training swims in Tiburon. Impressed with the group's efforts to raise money for the Wounded Warrior Project , he offered his boat, the Mariana which is docked in La Paz as part of his fishing charter company.
Safety on and off the boat is a primary concern. According to Night Train swimmer Matt Davie, "Our safety officer William "Spanky" Gibson will make sure that we have at least two spotters in the middle of the night so that everybody is ok and that we are swimming in the right direction. The swimmer who is in the water has glow sticks tied to the side of their Speedo and then we have these flashing beacon lights that you put on the back of your head on your goggle strap. We hang a couple of dimly lit lanterns inside the boat for the swimmer to see and follow the boat. Periodically the spotters will shine a light on the swimmer's face to signal the half-way point and 15 minutes remaining on the one hour swim leg. All the Medavac stuff is set up so if something goes wrong we can send an SOS signal which will summon a helicopter for a pickup."
Each of the six swimmers will relay swim four separate one hour swim legs per day for up to the four days it will take to swim 157 miles across the Sea of Cortez. According to Davie, rest will be scarce. "Between the time you get out of the water and when you get in again it's five hours. Add to that a half hour to towel off and eat something before you sleep and then being woken up a half hour before you swim and you are lucky if you get 4 hours of sleep between swims."
Next in the series: how Night Train Swimmers train for this world record attempt.
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