Earlier this year, Amy Appelhans Gubser achieved what many considered impossible: swimming nearly 30 miles from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Farallon Islands—a feat that no man or woman had ever completed before.
Amy faced unimaginable challenges: freezing 43-degree water, shark-infested depths, and hours upon hours of relentless swimming without a wetsuit.
We have written about her here and here. At the time, Sam was outraged by the lazy journalism that focused on her weight and family status, and didn’t even mention her name. I was interested to see how experienced swimmers reported on her feat, and and noted her many swimming achievements before this swim.
Now you can listen to Amy herself, in this podcast where she is interviewed about her swim.
I still think Amy is pretty darned cool. And I appreciate that the written intro to the podcast made no reference to her weight or her status as a grandmother. It even mentions her name!
As a person who used to think hard before sailing a sturdy boat to the Farallons, I was, and am, enormously impressed by her achievement. That water is not only cold, and home to many sharks; it is rough. The section right outside the Golden Gate Bridge is called “The Potato Patch,” which translates to “the place where 99 out of 100 people discover that yes, they do get seasick given certain conditions.” Actually, I just looked it up. It’s called that because boats carrying potatoes into SF bay too often lost their cargo in the rough waters. That left potatoes bobbing on the surface.
I went into that detail because it emphasizes just how tricky that area can be.
An amazing accomplishment to swim even part of it. All of it? Close to impossible, but she didn’t let that stop her!
43 degree water without a wetsuit? Yeah, I could handle that…for less than 43 seconds. I thought Monterey Bay was pretty chilly with a wetsuit. To the Farallons is an amazing feat! Trying to see the islands from shore was tough enough for me.