Swimming is hard work and my body is not designed for it. Period. Or, as Tehva now likes to say, "Full stop." But, in the name of non-aerodynamic people everywhere, I decided to give this Fahal Island thing a go. In the weeks leading up to the actual swim, info leaked down the chain to reach me and said information would either paralyze me with fear or lend a brief respite from the nerves: "My friend Mohammed says that he was fishing at Fahal Island last weekend and the waters were teeming with bull sharks!" This riveting story falls into the paralyzing category--bull sharks are known as vicious long-distance swimmer consumers, at least in my imagination.
"My friend Adel was out fishing near Fahal Island last weekend and he said the waters were full of jellyfish!" This allayed my nerves because I figured that bull sharks must hate jellyfish as much as I do and, thus, they would stay away.
"A few years back they cancelled the Fahal Island Swim because of ..." fill in the blank with a.) red tides; b.) choppy seas; c.) bull shark invasions. In fact, two days before the swim the sky over Muscat looked like this:
But there were no bull sharks evident and so I donned my highly attractive red swim cap and into the water I went,
along with 87 of my closest friends, only one of whom saw a shark. Kathy very wisely kept her mouth closed regarding the shark which, she later said, looked very confused about the sudden and unexpected presence of 5 power boats, 70 kayaks, one stand and paddle board, one canoe, and 88 humans 4 kilometers offshore. See the one with the goggles and red swim cap? That's Marlee, our "trainer". See the other one with the red swim cap and goggles? That's Nick. He backstroked the whole 4 km!
The Fahal Island Swim is a BYOKayak event (old lady sunglasses not required) and so I brought my own. Isn't he cute? If this were an endurance event in the USA, I would suspect that the requirement of a support boat was an avoiding-litigation thing. In Oman, I would suspect it has something more to do with safety, shipping lanes, and potential bull sharks. At any rate, finding my support kayak in the midst of the other 160 bobbing beings proved to be less of a challenge than I had been warned, mostly because no one else's kayaker was wearing granny glasses.
The swim, once it began, felt easy and smooth. The water was a perfect temperature. The "smell bands" that sometimes permeate the waters off the coast of Oman were absent that far out. Instead, my nose was filled with off-gassing from the brand new red swim cap I was wearing (required by the FIS organizers), the fumes from the support boat that was supporting two nearby swimmers, and the sudden need to vomit that overtook me about a kilometer into the swim.
I will spare you the gory details but simply add that it is possible to vomit in the sea and not drown while expelling one's...you get the picture, even though my kayaker didn't. Instead of photographing the vomit incident, he reportedly was waiting for me to drown and, at the same time, considering jumping to my rescue. This, however, would have endangered his old lady glasses and so he remained safely within his kayak.
Two hours on and I discovered that my plan to swim the right way had resulted in actually swimming the wrong way. In this photo you can see the point toward which I was told repeatedly NOT to swim. But not to worry, it ended being a very scenic point to tootle around, and harbored all sorts of reef fish and a black and white speckled manta ray.
