Lake Erie race was going swimmingly, until it wasn’t
20 km swim turns into a search-and-rescue mission
If you flew over Lake Erie on Sunday afternoon, you might not have noticed the distress below.
You’d have seen boats, of course, the distinctive red-orange of Fort Erie Fire Department vessels, coast guard boats and perhaps the 25 mismatched watercraft moving across the 25,744-square-km Great Lake.
What you wouldn’t have seen were the details that turned a fundraising swim race from Sturgeon Point, N.Y., to Crystal Beach into a frantic search-and-rescue mission: swimmers alone in choppy waves, crew members vomiting over boat rails, vessels losing their propellers and any ability to steer across the lake.
In the end, it was a call to the coast guard to find a missing swimmer — who’d been lost in the open water for 40 minutes already — that ultimately ended the race. Not one of the 41 swimmers made it to the other side.
“I’ve had better days,” organizer Miguel Vadillo said about 4 p.m., as he walked to meet swimmers who’d since been taken to dry land. Earlier on Sunday, Vadillo spoke to the Star from aboard one of the race’s accompanying boats. He wasn’t blind to the day’s rocky conditions, but was still optimistic.
“Right now? It’s pretty daunting,” Vadillo said about 10 a.m. The wind whipped in the background while he pointed out a current pulling east. Vadillo has been an open-water swimmer since his youth in Mexico.
“It is very challenging, knowing where you’re going, what you’re fighting, what you’re doing,” he said.
He wasn’t worried about the youngest swimmers — four 11- to 14-yearolds braving the water to raise money for Red Roof Retreat, a respite care facility in the Niagara region.
“Those guys are better swimmers than many others here. I worry about some of the adults that are behind that are not making it very far,” he admitted.
Some swimmers came to the race with high-profile causes. Dr. Sherri Mason, a key researcher of Great Lake pollution, was aiming to draw attention to how micro-plastics contaminate the freshwater. Carlos Costa swam against the odds of a doubleleg amputation, looking to become the first male para-swimmer to cross the lake.
But at 2:33 p.m, five-and-a-half hours after the race began, Vadillo revealed the day had gone awry: “Hang on is not looking good.”
A propeller had broken on one of the boats, and as it was no longer able to steer, its respective swimmer veered off alone. Vadillo went back with his boat in an attempt to step in as a crew. But the waves had got even more turbulent and the crew members started “puking down the side of the boat.”
The swimmer made the decision to call it a day, and was taken on the boat to Canadian waters.
Then they learned that another swimmer — Michael Kenny — was missing in open water. Organizers had been searching for 40 minutes; it was time to call in the coast guard.
At that point, Vadillo said, “the swimmers abandoned their own race to help a fellow swimmer.” All boats were re-allocated to the search, and the wayward swimmer was located an hour after he disappeared.
When he realized he was lost on the lake, Kenny said later, he decided that either going back or staying put would only mean more effort against the waves. So he eyeballed a white lighthouse in Canada and a distinct building in the U.S. and swam straight down the middle.
“I just said to myself, well, ‘I’ll keep going, and either they’ll catch up with me or they won’t!’ ”
About an hour later, one of the search vessels spotted him and called out to him.
“The coast guard came along and said, ‘Sir, you have to get out!’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t want to end my race! Can I wait until my boat shows up?’ ” he said.
“And they told me, ‘No, you have to get out.’ ”