Woman first to swim channel

BY ERIC LINDBERG
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

A mere two hundred meters from the shore, Rendy Lynn Opdycke hit a mess of seaweed. She had just swum nearly 26 miles and all she wanted to do was get to dry land and take a nap.
“It was like a carpet of kelp,” she said. “I wasn’t swimming, I was crawling. I started to laugh.”
Opdycke, 23, eventually made it to Thousand Step Beach in Santa Barbara last Saturday, becoming the fastest documented solo swimmer and the first woman to cross from Santa Cruz Island to the mainland.

Her time in the water? A speedy 10 hours and 51 minutes, about two and a half hours faster than England’s Paul Lewis, who made the solo journey in September 2006.
“To the best of our knowledge, she has been the fastest,” Emilio Casanueva, president and founder of the Santa Barbara Channel Swimming Association, told the Daily Sound.
Casanueva observed the swim and his organization, founded in 2006, officially sanctioned the record, which Opdycke said will also make the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame.
“I wanted to do something that I knew no other female had done,” Opdycke said. “And I really wanted to do a channel crossing.”
That is her reasoning for hitting the 60-degree water at 4:21 in the morning on Saturday, battling 5-foot swells, curious dolphins and hundreds of stinging jellyfish before reaching the shore nearly 11 hours later.
“I was a little dizzy and I didn’t have land legs,” Opdycke said. “I was definitely tired and wanted to take a nap pretty bad.”
A standard one-piece swimsuit, cap and goggles served as her only protection from the chilly seawater, which dipped to around 57 degrees in the middle of the channel. To get the record, Opdycke wasn’t allowed to don a wetsuit, and didn’t want to anyway. “Wussie-suits,” she calls them.
“I think it was about 11:30 when the sun came out,” she said. “That made my mood so much better.”
Although it warms her up, the sun also makes the water choppier, she said. A 50-foot sailboat, carrying her coach, an official observer and the crucial GPS navigation, kept her on track. Two kayakers supplied her with liquids and made sure she didn’t lose consciousness or enter hypothermic shock, Opdycke said.
Cold water has been a second home to her, however, since her childhood growing up on Mercer Island, Wash. She started competing in pool swimming at age seven before hitting the open water a few years later.
“I told my parents I could swim across the lake to the mainland, and they said I would be grounded if I did it,” Opdycke said. “Later that night, I was grounded.”
She gradually built her way up from one-mile and two-mile swims to five, 10, and 25 kilometers. Last year, she swam in the Manhattan Marathon Island Swim, a 28.5-mile jaunt. She won the event in 2005, but threw out her back last year and could only manage the silver medal.
She ran across Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish in San Diego, sunken sailboats in Florida and trash bags in New York. She crossed paths with manatees, baby shrimp, seals, whales and sharks.
“You name it, I’ve run into it,” Opdycke said. “The only thing I worry about is when they get a little too inquisitive.”
Currently a postgraduate at the University of Southern California, studying administration and student affairs with an emphasis in athletic administration, Opdycke plans to work with student athletes, providing academic support. She also plans to cross the 20-mile English Channel, considered one of the hardest channel crossings due to its rough waves and cold temperatures, once she saves up enough money for the trip.
In addition, Opdycke recently bought a road bike and is toying with the idea of becoming a triathlete.
“Eventually I’d really like to do an Ironman,” she said. “You never know. I never thought I’d be where I am today.”