Lake Baikal and Lynne Cox's 1988 swim
IronMike
Northern VirginiaCharter Member
Anyone have the exact start/finish spots for Lynne Cox's 1988 Lake Baikal swim? I found some newspaper articles about it. The articles mention her swimming from one cape to another across the Angara river, which is the large river entering the southwestern side of Baikal over by the city of Irkutsk. But I cannot find where she actually started or stopped. Her personal site has an interactive map, but that doesn't show where exactly she swam.
I don't think she is a member of the MSF, but maybe I missed her looking through the membership list. (I also emailed her booking agent to see if she'd pass the message on.)
We're all just carbon, water, starlight, oxygen and dreams
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"Swimming to Antarctica" (page 310 of the paper back) says the start point was renamed after her: A few months later, to commemorate the swim, officials placed a plaque at the starting point and named the cape beside Cape Tolstoy Cape Lynne Cox.
Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. --Neale Donald Walsch
Yeah, I searched for that on Russian maps and Google maps, but no joy.
Thanks!
We're all just carbon, water, starlight, oxygen and dreams
You can probably reach her through Facebook.
I'm not sure if an accurate map is actually here or not:
https://www.lynnecox.org/MapsNB.html
It's always a bad hair day when you work at a pool.
Yes, Lynne is very friendly on Facebook and is fantastically organized with annual birthday wishes. :-)
@IronMike maybe some of these links have info you haven't already found? I am a sucker for a puzzle...
From a UK newspaper story:
“...there is now a Cape Lynne Cox – just a few hundred yards down from Cape Leo Tolstoy”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/lynne-cox-the-ice-maiden-495308.html
A 2009 web page about a marathon swim in Lake Baikal, includes an email address to get more info (perhaps the email is still active?):
“21 year ago – in August 1988 – Lynne Cox swam 18K in Listvenichnaya Bay from Tolsty Cape to small town of Listvyanka. “
http://www.edowsc.org/ed/archives/858
Map of Lake Baikal showing Tolsty Cape:
http://www.baikalex.com/info/map.html
A video of part of Lynne Cox’s Baikal swim. (Unfortunately more attention is paid to the fellow playing the clarinet than Lynne.)
http://www.net-film.ru/en/film-27585/
Life begins at the end of your comfort zone. --Neale Donald Walsch
Thanks for the map. That cape is exactly one of the ones I figured she swam to/from. My maps didn't show a name.
The second report you found is the best, thanks for that. I figured she swam from the cape that turns out to be Cape Tolstoy to the town of Listvyanka, but since that came up to 18-19k by Google (and Yandex.ru), I figured that couldn't be it since the newspaper reports I found said she swam 7 miles. I wrote the Russian dude so we'll see.
Now to get the exact start / finish locations. One cannot repeat a swim w/o knowing the exact locations, right?
We're all just carbon, water, starlight, oxygen and dreams
Lynne's booking agent forwarded my email to her and we're talking now. Unfortunately, she doesn't have exact coordinates on her start/finish, but she's got enough detail that I can probably find the locations.
We're all just carbon, water, starlight, oxygen and dreams
@IronMike, did you ever deduce the specific start/finish locations of Lynne's Baikal swim?
Some other good LA Times articles on Lynne, linked from the article @IronMike posted earlier:
Thank you LA Times for making these old articles freely available!
Never got the exact locations, unfortunately. Next summer I'm planning on participating in the Lake Baikal swim which some enterprising Russians have organized. There's a 1-mile and 5K. The 5K crosses the Angara river which is where I think she swam, although the 5K would be shorter than her 7-mile route.
We're all just carbon, water, starlight, oxygen and dreams
We can get pretty close with the information we already have.
We know it was a ~7 mile swim that crossed the mouth of the Angara River, west to east, from a point "a few hundred yards" from Cape Tolstoy to the small town of Listvyanka.
Cape Tolstoy (Tolsty) is identified on the map previously linked by @JSwim, and the internet also tells us that the coastal railway goes through a tunnel at Cape Tolstoy. See Cape Tolstoy (and the tunnel) on Google Maps at 51.818333, 104.678348 .
Cape Tolstoy to Listvyanka would be 8+ miles, so we can infer that "Cape Lynne Cox" (the start of the swim, subsequently named after her by the Russians, but I guess it didn't catch on) is probably east of Cape Tolstoy, or somewhere around 51.826825, 104.695593 - otherwise it wouldn't be a straight-line route.
Distance from that point to closest part of Listvyanka is about 7.25 miles.
Forensic marathon swimming!