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Severe storms have temporarily halted Ben Lecomte in his bid to swim across the Pacific Ocean.
Lecomte is currently two months into The Longest Swim, which will see the Frenchman swim 5,500 miles from the coast of Japan to San Francisco.
The 51-year-old has covered around 500 miles so far, but has been forced to accompany his support crew back to a port in Japan after being alerted to a forecast of two powerful typhoons due to hit the ocean.
“Our lives at sea are pulsing at the beat of the weather,” Lecomte wrote on his blog following the decision to head for dry land. “Everything we do and how we do it, is influenced by it.
“In good conditions we can progress with our mission. I can swim and the crew can collect data, but in bad conditions, all activities are put on hold.
“In some situations it is not too clear what is safe or not and when those situations occur, as a team, we tried to take all input in and come up with the best decision, safety always being our top priority.
“The information we got from WRI, our weather forecaster and router partner, didn’t leave any space for interpretation or speculation. Two typhoons are coming from the east and moving in our direction with winds of 80 knots and 20 meters waves. Urgent, we need to sail back west now!
“This is another curveball from the weather and there is nothing we can do about it, we can only control our decisions. Here the decision was pretty clear, sailing back west.”
The crew have marked Lecomte’s last position in the water via GPS, so swimming will resume from exactly the same spot when the storms have cleared.
Lecomte, who is wearing TYR wetsuits and accessories, has already faced his fair share of dangers over the past two months, including sharks, storms and jellyfish.
His route is also due to take him straight through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the largest area of floating plastic and ocean debris in the world.
That is no coincidence, as Lecomte and his crew want to use The Longest Swim as a scientific study into pollution and oceanic research, as well as medical research into the effect of extreme exercise on the body.
Lecomte has been consuming around 8,000 calories per day to fuel his swimming schedule of eight hours per day. Finding the right nutritional balance is tough.
“In any endurance activities, nutrition is essential because it directly affects performance but it is very difficult to find food that is easily digested,” wrote Lecomte.
“Swimming adds another level of difficulty because there is no gravity and food is not naturally moving down, it stays longer in the stomach.
“I found out throughout the years that I cannot eat any ‘engineered’ food that packs a lot of calories in a very small volume. My body rejects it, yes I have to say it, I throw up.
“I can only eat natural salty food. I also have to have enough fluids. So, after many trials and errors or I should say, nausea and throw-ups, I found out that soup works the best for me. Plus I get a lot of pleasure ingesting something hot when I swim in cold waters.
“I have been very fortunate to find the right type of organic and nonperishable soup; LYOFOOD makes freeze-dried soup, we just add hot water to it and I am good to go.
“I eat some bread as well to supplement it with some solid food. During my eight hours of swimming, I eat about eight slices of bread, about one litre of thick soup, and some water.”
