Courtesy of Rubén Vara, Santa Engracia, Spain. Travesía a nado del Embalse de Santa Engracia is an open water swim in Araba in the Basque area of Spain on July 30th. The Travesía originally started in 1956 and then was disbanded. After several attempts to re-organize it for many years, the race was finally restarted […]

Courtesy of WOWSA, Huntington Beach, California. An Ice Zero Swim is the toughest standard physiologically, psychologically, operationally and generally logistically in the ice swimming community. An Ice Zero Swim is an Ice Mile that must be completed entirely in water temperature below 1°C (33.8°F). There have been 10 athletes who have completed this unique ice

Photo of Canadian George Young at the finish of the Wrigley Ocean Marathon Swim, courtesy of the Catalina Island Museum. It is not often that Sports Illustrated writes about open water swimming, but when it does publish an article on open water swimming, it is always a beautiful piece. Jon Wertheim wrote a fascinating article

Courtesy of Evgeny Levashev, Lake Baikal, Russia. The Baikal Swim is a 1-mile and 5 km lake swim on Baikal Lake in Irkutsk Region of Russia on July 29th-30th. The water temperature is expected to be in the 12-15°C range. The organizers include Alexandr Bazanov, Serge Rybkin, Andrey Mindryukov, Marat Bogdalov, and Evgeny Levashev. For

Courtesy of Twelve Productions for Outside Magazine. We occasionally dream about doing the impossible in the open water. Like… …swimming up a waterfall …swimming between Oahu and Kauai across the Kaieiewaho Channel in the middle of the Pacific Ocean …swimming down northeastern Pakistan’s Rondu Gorge [see above] If we have otherworldly powerful fins to propel

Courtesy of GQ, Windermere in the Lake District of England. Ross Edgley, the British creator of Strongman Swimming and popular fitness expert, completed his first Strongman Swim at the Great Swim in Windermere in 3 hours 55 minutes. His particular form of open water swimming requires that the former water polo player swims as he

California’s Long Beach runs an ocean and bay water testing program. The ocean and bay waters are monitored for bacteria levels weekly. These results are placed in the following categories: * Green: Open where the water quality meets the State of California standards. * Blue: Advisory where the water quality does not meet minimum State

Courtesy of Alejandro Alfarache, Maratona del Golfo Capri-Napoli, Italy. The Maratona del Golfo Capri-Napoli is the fifth leg of the 2017 FINA Open Water Swimming Grand Prix. While the professional marathon swim is one of the longest-running professional marathon swimming competitions in the world, it also offers an amateur option organized by Luciano Cotena. In

Courtesy of Antonio Argüelles, soon to embark on an attempt to swim across the North Channel between Scotland and Northern Ireland and complete the Oceans Seven. A few days ago I had a strange dream. In it were my great-grandmother María, my grandmother Martha, Aunt Nina and Don Julián. A cocktail of adventures and memories.

Courtesy of WOWSA, Huntington Beach, California. We love it when we see photos, videos and conversations between swimmers, escort crew members, and pilots from different cultures, especially when those people are brought together by their passion for the open water. In 2015, Mexican entrepreneur Antonio Argüelles traveled to northern Japan and crossed the Tsugaru Channel