A group of swimmers are set to jump into the water at Sturgeon Point, N.Y., Saturday morning and race to Crystal Beach, Ont., in the first marathon swim race across Lake Erie.
Organized by Guelph’s Embrace Open Water Swimming and Turkey Point’s North Shore Open Water Challenge, the Embrace the Challenge 20-kilometre swim race across Lake Erie is sanctioned by the Great Lakes Crossing Organization and the World Open Water Swimming Association and is part of the Global Swim Series.
“It’s fairly challenging and it’s a great lake crossing. That’s what we wanted,” Miguel Vadillo of Embrace Open Water Swimming said. “People wanted to have the opportunity to be a Great Lakes crosser and Lake Erie at that part of the lake on the eastern side offered a course that is recognized internationally as a crossing for Lake Erie and it doesn’t involve night swimming which, logistically, makes it more difficult.”
Vadillo and Josh Reid of the North Shore Challenge are the organizers of the event.
“It is daunting and it is definitely a new thing,” Vadillo said. “Nobody has done it before at the scale we’re doing it. The previous time that there was any race in the Great Lakes was over 40 years ago and it was five professional guys that were paid to do it in Lake Ontario. This is the first time ever that Lake Erie has had a race.”
A marathon swimmer himself, Vadillo has crossed Lake Erie on that course and knows what the 43 swimmers entered in the event can expect. The race has attracted 13 solo swimmers including Cameron Mahon of Guelph and six five-person relay teams including two teams from Guelph.
“It’s going to be windy. It’s not going to be an easy swim,” Vadillo said. “We wish for the wind to not be too hard, but really we don’t know until we’re there. They should expect a strong current coming from the west toward the east, toward the Niagara River. They should expect a slower pace than when they train because of the conditions and the wind. However, it’s a doable swim for sure. It’s not going to be easy, but it’s going to be manageable, especially for the experience that these guys have.”
Lake Erie was picked for the race to make it a relatively quick race. The race is to start on the U.S. side at 7:30 a.m. and the crossing should take five to five and a half hours with the faster relay teams finishing first.
“Lake Ontario would be overnight and it would be too long and too cold,” Vadillo said.
“(Lake Erie’s) much warmer. It’s a shallower lake so it warms up quicker and stays warm longer. Lake Ontario is very unpredictable.”
For the relay, each team will change swimmers every 30 minutes and the race also has a 10-hour time limit.
“If it’s six hours and you haven’t covered 10 kilometres, we’ll pull you out because we don’t want to risk anyone in the water by dusk,” Vadillo said. “We don’t want to go overnight with anybody so if the conditions are such that the swimmers are slow and we see that they won’t make the 10-hour cut-off, then we will pull them out of the water.”
And, of course, no competitor wants that to happen.
“It is very disappointing,” Vadillo said. “You’re racing and you’re going well and then there’s lightning. The two times recently that I was pulled was because of lightning, but that’s what it is. Everybody is pulled out and there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s safety and you want to do it another time.”
