ATexas man will attempt to become the first person to swim across the Pacific Ocean next year, after almost five years of setbacks.
Benoit Lecomte, 49, revealed his intentions at the University of Texas at Austin on Thursday. He says he will set off from Tokyo in April 2017 and – conditions and sharks willing – arrive in San Francisco five to six months later. He hopes the swim will raise awareness of environmental issues.
It is the third time in under five years that Lecomte has announced he plans to swim the Pacific. He was originally due to begin the quest in May 2013. After that attempt was foiled, he announced that he would begin the swim in December 2015. This time he is confident his attempt will go ahead.
“The main issue has always been the boat,” Lecomte said. He has pursued two different boating options in the past four years. He abandoned plans to use one vessel after the captain had a heart attack. Another boat, called Stella, was deemed unsuitable when it turned out the boat was a unique build, with no blueprints available should anything go wrong at sea.
This time will be different, Lecomte said. He has purchased a boat, the Discoverer, that has been previously used in the Global Challenge, a round-the-world-yacht race. He is confident in its seaworthiness.
“We won’t have any issues with the owner and the skipper is in our team,” Lecomte said. “It’s a boat has been used to being in offshore situations, it has been proven and it has a steel hull so it is very strong.”
Lecomte is originally from France but has been based in Austin for more than 20 years. In 1998 he became the first person to swim the Atlantic Ocean, completing the 3,700-mile swim in 73 days. This latest challenge dwarfs even that feat, however – Lecomte will need to swim 5,500 miles to make it to San Francisco.
He will swim for an average of eight hours a day, resting and eating on the Discoverer.
The swim will take Lecomte through the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch – a vast area of floating waste that scientists believe spans 1,351,000 sq miles. Lecomte said he was inspired to swim the Pacific after noticing changes in the ocean.
“I’ve been doing open-water swims for a very long time and I have seen the changes in the ocean, the environment,” Lecomte said. “More plastic, less fish, and every time I swim with my kids I always think about what type of world I am going to leave behind.
“It became very clear to me that the only way to go forward was to use my passion to get attention on an issue that affects all of us.”
Lecomte will be accompanied by an eight-person crew which will use scientific equipment – provided by Nasa and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, among other organisations – to gather samples during the crossing. They will hand over their findings to a team of oceanographers on their return.
When Lecomte swam the Atlantic he was followed by a shark for five days. He said he hopes to see sharks during his Pacific swim “because if we don’t see them, it will say a lot about their state”.
His team will use an electromagnetic field to prevent sharks from eating him. Sharks use special receptors, located on their head and snout, to sense the electrical fields of objects in the water. Creating an electro-magnetic field can disrupt those receptors and harmlessly deter the shark from attacking.
Sharkbanz, a manufacturer of magnetic shark-repellant bracelets, likened the shark’s experience to “a person suddenly shining a very bright light in your eyes in a dark room”.
Away from marine life, Lecomte said the most difficult part of the swim will be dealing with the isolation of swimming alone for eight hours every day.
“The challenge is to keep your mind sane and to be focused. It’s mind over matter,” he said. Lecomte has been training on land to be able to “disassociate” his mind from his body.
“Before going in the morning I know exactly what I am going to do with my mind, hour by hour. I’ll be making my own movies, creating my own buildings, and reliving moments I lived in the past and engaging all my senses so I can remember what I was doing very precisely.
“Remembering how the smell was, how the wind was, the sun on my skin, to be very detailed about all those elements. Then you get transported into a particular day.”