He Swam Halfway Across Lake Michigan. Then His GPS Batteries Failed

Last year, Jim Dreyer was twice foiled by bad weather when he tried to swim across Lake Michigan to mark the 25th anniversary of the first time he accomplished the feat. This year, the weather cooperated, at least at first, but he had to call off the 83-mile swim on the third day because of a battery shortage. On Tuesday, Dreyer began the swim from Grand Haven, Michigan, to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, towing a dinghy with food and other supplies, the AP reports. In an account of the swim on his website, the 60-year-old says that soon after his support team visited on Wednesday, when he was on track to finish the swim in 60 hours instead of the expected 72, the batteries in the GPS in the support craft began to die.

Dreyer says he placed the bag of eight replacement AA batteries to his left, turned to the right to remove the old ones, and turned to his left to see that the bag was gone. “I tore that supply craft apart looking for them, but to no avail,” he says. “Somehow the bag of batteries must have been pitched overboard.”

• Dreyer says was less than halfway through the swim at that point, but he decided to continue, planning to navigate by his wrist compass and the stars. But, he says, he tends to experience “wild hallucinations during the second night of a continuous swim,” and that’s what happened Wednesday night.
• He says he saw mysterious lights, a Milky Way that filled the entire sky, freighters that shot back and forth, and, in what may have been symbolic, a wall that “suddenly rose up from Lake Michigan right in front of me.” He says: “I could see it vividly. It was made of large steel girders with a metal mesh in between. It’s as if some force was saying, ‘You will not pass.’”
• Dreyer says he swam through the wall and continued toward what he thought were the lights of Milwaukee but got an unpleasant surprise when the support boat arrived on Thursday.

• Dreyer learned that he had spent the night swimming in circles. While he had swum a total of 60 miles, he was still a few miles short of the halfway point, with 45 miles to go, and the weather was about to turn. From Thursday night onward, there “would be 9-foot waves in my face directly out of the west. Pulling the weight of my supplies, this current would have me on a treadmill.”
• He says he decided to call off the swim because if he ran into trouble in 9-foot waves, the Coast Guard, not the support team, would have to rescue him.
• “I did not want to call upon the US Coast Guard for rescue on the taxpayer’s dollar,” Dreyer says, “especially when the purpose of the swim is to raise funds for the US Coast Guard’s Chief Petty Officers Association.”

• “Basically, in the end, you know, I was alone in the middle of Lake Michigan with just a compass and eyes I couldn’t trust. That pretty much sums it up right there—lost the battle to my GPS,” Dreyer tells MLive.com.
• Dreyer is one of seven people to have swum across Lake Michigan, a feat that was long considered impossible, reports the Detroit Free Press. When he completed the swim in 1998, he became the second person to have crossed all the Great Lakes.
• He says he “definitely” wants to try again, but it’s not clear when. Dreyer says his other commitments include next year’s Edmund Fitzgerald Memorial Swim, in which swimmers will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the tragedy by swimming the doomed freighter’s route from Lake Superior to Detroit.

(More Lake Michigan stories.)