On this day, at the age of 32, the long-distance American open-water swimmer, Florence May Chadwick, swam across the English Channel from France to England in 13 hours and 23 minutes, breaking the existing women’s record of another American woman, Gertrude Eberle, established in 1926. One year later, Chadwick crossed the channel again, from England to France this time, in 16 hours and 22 minutes, thus becoming the first woman to swim across the channel in both directions, and setting a record for the England-France journey. She was also the first woman to swim the Catalina Channel, the Straits of Gibraltar, the Bosporus (one way), and the Dardanelles (round trip). Already, at the age of ten, Chadwick became the youngest person to swim across the mouth of San Diego Bay. She died at San Diego’s Mercy Hospital of leukemia on 15th March 1995. After cremation, her ashes were scattered into the ocean off San Diego’s Point Loma, not far from where she grew up.
Read Bob Lynn’s short story “Salt and Champagne”
about Gertrude Eberle’s 1926 channel crossing HERE
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