Lynne Cox

From Freepedia

Lynne Cox (born 1957) is a long-distance open-water swimmer and writer. In 1971 she completed the first crossing of the Catalina Island Channel, and twice held the record for the fastest crossing of the English Channel (1972 and 1973). In 1975, Cox became the first woman to swim the 10°C (50°F), 16km (10 mile) Cook Strait in New Zealand. In 1976, she was the first person to swim the Straits of Magellan in Chile, the first to swim across the Skagerrak, and the first to swim around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, where she had to contend with sharks, jellyfish, and sea snakes.

Cox is perhaps best known for swimming the Bering Strait from the island of Little Diomede in Alaska to Big Diomede, then part of the Soviet Union, where the water temperature averaged around 4°C (40°F). At the time, in 1987, people living on the Diomede Islands, only 3km (two miles) apart, were not permitted to see each other, although many people had close family members living on the other island. Even more remarkably, her accomplishment eased Cold War tensions as Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Washington, DC to jointly congratulate her success.

Cox's most remarkable accomplishment was swimming more than a mile in the freezing waters of Antarctica. Although hypothermia would set in in most humans inside of five minutes, Cox was in the water for 25 minutes. Her first book, Swimming to Antarctica, was published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2004.