Grandmother becomes first person to complete 17 hour swim through great white shark infested waters
A 55-year-old woman has set a new record as the first swimmer to complete a gruelling journey of almost 30 miles through shark-infested waters.
On 11 May, grandmother Amy Appelhans Gubser set off from a boat below the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, US, and spent the next 17 hours swimming the 29.7 miles to the Farallon Islands off the west coast of the US.
The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Gubser is only the sixth swimmer to successfully complete this task, and the first to swim out to sea from the mainland.
Swimming out to sea is a harder journey as for much of the time the tides and wind would be working against the swimmer, but the 55-year-old managed it all the same.
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There's also the risk of being gobbled up by a great white shark along the way, but the grandmother managed to stay out of the jaws of beasties.
A mum of two and a grandmother of two, Gubser works as a nurse coordinator at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, and after finishing her shift she took a nap and then set off at 3:25am local time on the Saturday morning.
She said: "It was the toughest thing that I have ever set out to do. I look out at those islands every day from Pacifica.
"I joke with my husband all the time that I could swim there. It just draws me because it is so captivating and eerie."
The 55-year-old spent years training for the marathon swim by doing other cold water challenges, including swimming from Ireland to Scotland, but this was her longest and coldest swim.
She couldn't wear a wetsuit for the challenge either, as open water marathon swimmers can only have a swimsuit, cap, goggles and earplugs.
"I was pretty steady for the most part, but at the end we hit a strong current and the water got colder," she said of the particular challenge the Gulf of the Farallones swim poses to the handful of people who've overcome it.
"My progress was slowed because I was chilled to the bone. I did not expect 43 degrees (6°C). That was nuts."
She was accompanied on her swim by a support boat and a team of support swimmers who each completed a part of the journey with her after the 15 mile mark.
Marathon swimming rules only permit a support swimmer to be in the water with the challenger for an hour at a time, with an hour in between allowing another swimmer to join them.
Gubser named her 67-year-old stepbrother Dan Fine as an inspiration that kept her going, as he is currently being treated for stage four pancreatic cancer.
Another motivation to keep going was knowing that if she failed then she'd end up having to do the challenge again.
Her training also involved swimming for two hours in the dark against an incoming tide two to three days a week.
Joe Harker