News
NYC Alpha-1 Swim Team's English Channel crossing wasn't easy; swim had to be completed at night in chilling 3-4 foot waves
Newsday
The five business executives aged 47 to 63 who set out to swim the English Channel in a charity relay last weekend made it in 14 hours, 28 minutes.
It wasn’t easy. They started from Dover, England, at 10:52 a.m. Friday with a 35-foot fishing boat and finished on the rocky French coast south of Calais at 1:20 a.m. British time on Saturday. Though they weren’t the first to make the 20-mile-plus swim, the channel’s cold, angry seas turned it into a heroic effort.
New York City Alpha-1 Swim Team, from left: Steve Reiss, Jeff Bodenmann, Richard Abramson, Steve Bookbinder and David Moore
“I clearly suffered from hypothermia,” Steven Reiss, 56, an attorney from Manhattan and Hampton Bays, said in an e-mail, “but I was revived with a hot drink called Maxim served by the captain’s wife. I have no idea what’s in it, but I definitely want to buy the stock.”
David J. Moore, 56, of Manhasset, chimed in by e-mail. “What Steve has not said is that he was suffering from … nausea and a complete lack of energy when he entered the water to finish the swim. It was 1 a.m., three-to-four-foot waves in a dark and angry sea.
