while seven South Africans The swimmers are set To climb the Everest of all swimmers, the English Channel, a local remembers being the first European woman to come out and cross South Africa’s own channel – the daunting 34km False Bay.
Cape Town October Tony Scalabrino There is a modest type. When you’re sitting across from him at the dinner table, it’s not immediately obvious that here is one of the true pioneers of open-water swimming. If you look at this 80-year-old plug out length at the Sea Point Pavilion, you can catch a glimpse of the hard material that history is made of. He’s certainly not the fastest swimmer, but he has a mischievous glint in one eye. And Scalabrino has only one eye; Another is a glass eye. People tell stories of Scalabrino washing up on the beach like a barrel after a seven-hour swim. A physician, unaware that Scalabrino had glass eyes, saw him slumped in the sand and rushed to tap his eye to check his corneal reflexes, apparently dealing with a stiff, non-responsive eye. The doctor almost died of a heart attack when Scalabrino sat up and asked him what he was thinking, tapping away.
He is also a great storyteller. Like this gem.
It’s early 1989, and the international swimming world and the dailies are abuzz with a bunch of crazy swimmers in Cape Town. cold water Sharks. serious distance. The ink seemed barely dry on the headlines of the inaugural Double Robben Island Relay Race a year ago, so, reading the room well, a local company called Penny Pinchers brought the Belgian open water sensation. Enemy surveyors Out of Cape Town to showcase your talent.
Landmeters duly broke all the local women’s Table Bay records, as well as taking around three and a half hours from the fastest man on the epic 22km Three Anchor Bay to Robben Island and back, then asked if it was possible for her to swim. Across False Bay. It was a sore point. Many, many good South African swimmers had tried to cross that gulf, and they had all failed, most of them Cape Long Distance Swimming Association Founder Peter Bales, defeated by the current halfway across.
In fact, local swimmer Derek Yack had been training specifically for that swim for months, but couldn’t even set foot in the water, Scalabrino says. His support team couldn’t pin down the exact set of conditions for swimming, to begin with, never mind to finish.
In those days, a swimmer and his team wanting to cross False Bay from east to west had to leave Cape Town at 2am and launch their boat and equipment into unpredictable seas, with no real certainty of what to expect when. They reached there.
Yak had previously asked Scalabrino to find the best route, and for that Scalabrino had all the boffins, seamen, fishermen, meteorologists, trying to plan this swim.
One Sunday morning after tea at the Hanclip Cafe, Scalabrino and his wife struck up a conversation with one of the regular divers, who suggested that the best route for swimming would start from Rui Els, on the east side of the bay. Aim for Muizenberg in a north-westerly direction. So, once across the middle current, turn due west. Hope you pick up land again in Smitswinkel Bay.
Scalabrino then pursued two university research students, one of whom built a scale model of False Bay, complete with water currents, while the other hired a light aircraft to fly over False Bay and drop paint bombs to study the current direction. But the two disagreed with each other’s findings, and Scalabrino was no closer to solving the problem.
And now here is Annemie Landmeters. It is next Sunday afternoon. He is only in town for a few days. No time to study weather patterns. In desperation, Scalabrino called his go-to meteorologist, a meteorologist at the weather office at the nuclear power station. But it’s the weekend, so everything is closed.
He knew the penguin’s telephone number, as everyone nicknamed the lighthouse at Cape Point. He thought he would see what he would see by handing the ring to the staff there they Had to say about the weather for the next few days. Scalabrino calls, but misdials.
“Is this a penguin?” Tony asks.
“No, what on earth are you trying to talk to a penguin for?” A confused reaction ensues.
Scalabrino apologizes and explains that there is this woman who wants to cross False Bay.
“He must be bonkers,” comes a shouted reply, perhaps a little more colorful than that. “But I can tell you, the weather will be perfect tomorrow, Monday morning, and the sea will be flat, flat, flat. I’ve been a fisherman for 20 years and I know False Bay inside and out.”
Scalabrino ended the call and wondered what to do. Should he trust the random fisherman?
Long story short, he trusted the fisherman’s advice. Scalabrino and Peter Bales took their two boats to Rue Else and, swimming alongside the landmeters, launched in a north-westerly direction, aiming for Muizenberg.
The rest is history. Annemie Landmeters becomes the first person to swim in False Bay!
History, however, often forgets that shortly after the surveyors judged that they had indeed crossed this elusive midstream and turned the boats westward, two great white fins clipped to their bows, as recommended by the diver on Sunday afternoon.
“We put the anemone close to the boat, of course, but they show no interest in swimming and they go down south,” says Scalabrino.
But then came the fog. Now, his engine was getting him up early in the morning, and in those days there was no such thing as a GPS. Tony Scalabrino quickly took a manual compass reading, before the fog had fully descended.
Aboard his boat, he has a brand new big toy – a direction finder that gives longitude and latitude. big deal He powers it up, and the sophisticated instrument warns that on the current trajectory, they are going to miss Cape Point and hit Uruguay on the South American mainland. Now sweating a little, Scalabrino turns to the other machine she has — a small, battered old radio locator that picks up radio beacons on Cape Point. This old thing goes beep beep beep, beeeep Enthusiastically, and proudly informs everyone that, no, they are pushing a course for Cape Point. But which machine to trust!
He took his trusty old radio gadget with him. And the compass reading he luckily took away. “An hour later, when the fog lifted, it turned out that we were on the right track to the other side of False Bay, heading towards Smitswinkel Bay!” Tony Scalabrino’s gut instincts were spot on!
Then a south-westerly came up, and the boat, with its faulty engines, began to toss towards Miller’s Point. It wasn’t necessarily a problem, except that Whittle Rock is in their way. Last week, the dailies were full of stories about a great white that bit a flipper off a diver at Whittle Rock.
What to do! Finally, Scalabrino’s boat engine gave up the ghost. The NSRI sent a boat from Simons Town to help him ashore, and a second captain – Peter Bales – safely brought the enemy landmeters to Miller’s Point and into the history books. DM/ML
For more cool swims, read on this story.
After swimming 34 km facing ice cold water
