Updated July 15
Eight brave participants planned to take part in a relay swim Tuesday across the 18 miles of ocean from Nantucket to Martha’s Vineyard to accomplish something that’s never been done before, but weather conditions, tidal currents, and busy schedules have forced a change of plans.
It was supposed to be the fourth try for 66-year-old Doug McConnell, one of the eight swimmers slated for the relay.
The swim has only been completed in the reverse direction.
McConnell is the co-founder of A Long Swim, a nonprofit that designs and manages open-water swimming events to raise funds to research amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. McConnell lost his father, Dr. David McConnell, and sister, Ellen, to the disease.
The summer Island resident, who started open-water swimming in 2009 after years at the pool and a successful career on the University of Illinois swim team, has crossed the English Channel, the Catalina Channel, swum from Molokai to Oahu in Hawaii, and also circled the island of Manhattan. The nonprofit has raised almost $2 million through his swims.
The trek from Nantucket to Martha’s Vineyard, however, has proven to be the hardest beast to tame. In McConnell’s first attempt in August 2019, where he said he became much too friendly with jellyfish, he was as close as 300 strokes from Chappaquiddick, by Wasque Point, when rip currents halted his swim.
A current that would’ve landed him on the Cape thwarted his next attempt in 2021. Finally, in 2022, McConnell hit a wall about three-quarters through the swim.
“I had never felt fatigue like I did,” McConnell said. “I knew something was terribly wrong, and as it turns out, I had picked up Lyme disease. That’s when I discovered [I had Lyme], in the middle of the Nantucket Sound.”
Two years later, he still has Lyme disease, and so hasn’t been able to train as he should for an 18-mile swim as a single swimmer. That’s why he introduced the idea of a relay.
The eight swimmers — McConnell, his cousin Bruce, Rainy Goodale, Jonathan Chatinover, Greg Mason, Greg Mone, Noah Froh, and Josh Thomson — planned to divide into two groups of four, swim in one-hour increments, and follow open-water marathon swimming rules: no touching the escort boat, and no wetsuits. Thomson predicts the crossing would take nine to 10 hours.
Thomson was the first person McConnell called when he had the idea of a relay. “He called a handful of people, and boy, they really responded,” McConnell said. All they needed to do was confirm a day.
Unfortunately, over the weekend, McConnell consulted his weather experts, who predicted rugged weather conditions with steady winds in the teens and up to the thirties early this week. Those aren’t “suitable conditions” for open-water swims, McConnell said.
Now they risk the loss of the correct tidal behavior to ferry them from one Island to the other, which won’t come again until August or September.
“Everyone’s pretty disappointed, but that’s the nature of marathon swimming,” McConnell said. He explained that when he traveled to cross the English Channel, he landed on British soil and was immediately told he’d have to push up his swim to the next afternoon because of foul weather predictions. He was “still loopy from jetlag” when he swam across the channel. “The reality is that it’s a sport where the weather is in charge,” he said.
But the dream isn’t over yet. They can wait a few weeks for favorable tides in the Nantucket Sound, but the relay team is also considering a swim between Woods Hole and Menemsha, about 12.5 miles, in the next couple of weeks, when the weather cooperates and schedules are open.
