15-year-old Brian Foster of Kinsale, Ireland has been paying his long-distance training dues for quite some time, despite his youth.
Back in October 2021, he completed his 100th lap around Sandycove Island to earn an official Sandycove Island yellow cap.
Dial forward to the 2022 winter and 2023 spring and Foster has continued to pay his dues, training daily round and round around his famed island in Cork, Ireland.
But Foster recently enjoyed a warm stretch of water between Santa Catalina Island and the Southern California mainland where he walked in, swam 32.2 km across, and hustled out on Palos Verdes Peninsula in 11 hours 3 minutes.
The day earlier, he had encountered massive lateral currents with good 6-9 foot faces on pounding Pacific Ocean surf in Huntington Beach. Despite seeing a fewer number of normally present California surfers, Foster smiled broadly and simply asked, “Where do we go in the water?”
Warming up for the next night’s channel crossing, Foster swam fast in the wash of rapidly moving currents. “I swam nearly a minute in 100 meters in the surf,” he smiled to his channel swimming mates Finbarr Hedderman and father Steven Foster.
Brian recalled afterwards, “Swimming at night was exciting, but tough. It dragged on for a long time, but I kept turning my arms over and when the sun came up everything was significantly easier. There was a great excitement during the swim. It’s such an amazing opportunity to be able to swim the Catalina Channel. The finish felt amazing, to be able to feel the ground beneath you, knowing it’s a feeling you can only achieve through working hard.”
Hedderman from Cork, Ireland also crossed successfully the night after Foster crossed. On September 8th, Hedderman swam across in 15 hours 5 minutes while encountering plenty of ocean swells and pods of dolphins. His crossing was supported by Stephanie Hopson, Brian Foster, and Steven Foster, with Angela Lee and Alessandro Libenson provided kayak support while Marc Horwitz and Rachel Wetterlin were on board Pacific Moon as official CCSF observers.
Hedderman said of his crossing, “Swimming at night for such a long time was new for me – I had done an hour at night before, but never such a long time, it felt never ending – once the sun came up after 8 hours it felt like a whole new swim had started. Up to before the sunrise, I really want to quit the swim and get out, but when the sun rose something clicked and I knew I’d finish.
I took a lot of learnings from the swim. It was 9 years since my last channel swim the step up from 20 km to 30 km+ was much more difficult than I anticipated, I had done a few 6 or 7 hour swims, but I was overconfident for this channel crossing.”
Foster was supported by kayakers Dan Simonelli and Barb Schumacher, and his father Steven Foster. Joel Virgel and Roxanne Hipolito were on board Pacific Moon as official CCSF observers.
© 2023 Daily News of Open Water Swimming
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