A swimmer said two lost batteries ruined his attempt to cross Lake Michigan on the third day of the extraordinary journey.
Jim Dreyer, 60, was pulled from the water Thursday after 60 miles (96 kilometers). He said he had been swimming from Michigan to Wisconsin for hours without a working GPS unit.
A support boat pulled up and informed him that he had been swimming north all day — “the wrong direction,” said Dreyer, who had left Grand Haven on Tuesday.
“What a blow!” he said in a report which he posted online. “I should have been on the home stretch, well into Wisconsin waters with about 23 miles to go. Instead, I had 45 miles to go, and the weather window was closing soon.”
Dreyer said his “brain was mush” and he had hallucinations of freighters and a steel wall. He figured he would need a few more days to reach Milwaukee, but there was a forecast of 9-foot (2.7-meter) waves.
“We all knew success was now a long shot and the need for rescue was likely if I continued,” Dreyer said.
Dreyer, whose nickname is The Shark, crossed Lake Michigan in 1998, starting in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, and finishing in Ludington, Michigan. But three attempts to do it again since last summer have failed.
Dreyer towed an inflatable boat with food and supplies last week. The second day he paused to pick up new AA batteries to keep a GPS unit running. But in the process, he said, he somehow dropped the bag into the lake.
That left him with only a wrist compass and the sky and waves to help him keep moving west.
“It was an accident, but it was my fault,” Dreyer said of the lost batteries. “This is a tough pill to swallow.”
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