By Peter Payette and Linda Stephan
Strong currents and cooling water temperatures forced a pair of open-water swimmers to abandon their swim across Lake Michigan last night.
Jeff and Sara Tow say the swim started out well in Wisconsin. All day and through the night there were calm waters and water temperatures in the 70s. But as the sun rose, so did wave heights and they abandoned the swim roughly 13 miles off the coast of Ludington.
“We just got caught in a bad nine-mile-an-hour current that just pushed us way off course and, you know, completely switched our optimism to, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t think we can continue on,’” says Sara Tow.
“My kids became a real factor,” she says. “I could not get them out of my head. And I thought, you know, if we pushed our bodies any further, we could be causing, you know – certainly we would never want our kids not to have parents and that’s kind of where we were at, at that point.”
The Tows were exhausted, nauseated, dehydrated and suffered hypothermia by the time they abandoned the swim. They were evaluated after at Ludington Memorial Medical Center.
Their trip, Through the Blue, was to raise awareness for postpartum depression.
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