04/21/2007

Dreyer aims to swim length of Great Lakes basin

He starts tour in TC on Sunday

By Garret Ellison

gellison@record-eagle.com

TRAVERSE CITY — The cameras will be rolling when ultra-marathon swimmer and tri-athlete Jim Dreyer launches his two-year Great Lakes Preservation Tour — which will include an attempt at swimming the Great Lakes basin from Minnesota to New York — with a short Earth Day swim in West Bay on Sunday.

Dreyer, who swims for charity causes, nearly died last August in the Straits of Mackinac. This time around he's spotlighting concerns like pesticide runoff and heavy metals pollution during a series of 2007 short swims in Lake Michigan ports.

A film crew will follow in his wake, shooting footage for a documentary, "Before the Autumn Gales.” The mammoth basin swim will happen next summer.

"This is really a kind of awareness event to give people an idea of what were going to be doing all summer,” Dreyer said.

He hopes to emerge from the 35-degree water at Clinch Park and greet a throng of garbage bag-toting locals cleaning the beach.

Record-Eagle/Douglas Tesner
Ultra-marathon swimmer and tri-athlete Jim Dreyer will launch his attempt to swim the Great Lakes from TC.

"I'm excited to get out of the pool and stretch out,” he said.

Because of the danger of injury in advance of numerous planned swims, he figures on keeping it short and simple.

Regardless, swimming in near-freezing water is difficult to say the least, said an expert on marine medicine and sea survival, Dr. Alan Steinman, of DuPont, Wash.

"Your muscles don't work effectively,” he said. The cold water will "fairly quickly cool the arms and shoulders — and those need to be used to stay afloat.”

He said Dreyer's physical fitness coupled with a wetsuit will still provide a high degree of buoyancy and insulation.

"For someone like that it's hard to predict limits,” he said.

This two-year project is Dreyer's Great Lakes grand finale to a record-setting career in which he set speed and distance records on all five lakes. He often combines these swims with marathon running and biking.

He swam the length of Lake Michigan in 2003, and solo across Lake Superior through a fierce storm in 2005, both while towing his supplies in a kayak.

Dreyer was rushed to the emergency room after his heart stopped briefly last August after attempting to cross the Straits of Mackinac 31 consecutive times. He made it a third of the way before succumbing to shoulder pain and nausea.

He called the planned basin swim from Duluth, Minn., to Cape Vincent, N.Y. at the mouth of the St. Lawrence Seaway — a 58-stage, 1,300 mile quest through lakes Superior, Huron, Erie and Ontario — the "ultimate finale.” Towing his supplies, he estimates it will take four months.

"I can't think of anything else left on the Great Lakes that would constitute raising the bar,” the 43-year-old, Byron Center resident said. "I'm not going to sit on my couch and eat Oreo cookies, but I don't know if there's anything else after this.”

Should he finish, he will have eclipsed his own world distance record for a staged self-sufficient swim, the 2003 Lake Michigan journey.

Since Lake Michigan is not on the basin swim route, Dreyer's environmental shorts this year will take place in towns along that coast.

"We're going to be interviewing people on both sides of controversial problems like sewage outflow and things like that,” he said about the planned documentary, under the director of director Vince Deur.

He said invasive species and water diversion will be tacked as well.

"There's a lot of people who want to pipe our lakes away from us,” he said. "These causes I'm swimming for are larger than myself.”

For more information, visit www.SwimJimSwim.org. The beach clean-up begins at 1 p.m. Bring your own trash bags.