Marathon swimmer says he quit Lake Michigan after going in wrong direction with dead GPS

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Andrew Feinberg

White House Correspondent

A swimmer said two lost batteries spoiled his attempt to cross Lake Michigan on the third day of the extraordinary journey.

Jim Dreyer, 60, was pulled from the water last Thursday after 60 miles (96 kilometers). He said he had been swimming from Michigan to Wisconsin for hours without a working GPS device.

A support boat pulled up and informed him that he had been swimming north all day — “the wrong direction,” said Dreyer, who had left Grand Haven on Tuesday.

“What a blow!” he said in a report that he posted online. “I should have been in the home stretch, well into Wisconsin waters with about 23 miles (37 kilometers) to go. Instead, I had 47 miles (75 kilometers) to go, and the weather window would soon close.”

Dreyer said his “brain was mush” and he was having hallucinations about freighters and a steel wall. He figured he would need a few more days to reach Milwaukee, but there was a forecast of 9-foot (2.7-meter) waves.

“We all knew that success was now a long shot and the need for rescue was likely if I continued,” Dreyer said.

Dreyer, whose nickname is The Shark, crossed Lake Michigan in 1998, starting in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, and finishing in Ludington, Michigan. But three attempts to do it again since last summer have been unsuccessful.

Dreyer was towing an inflatable boat with nutrition and supplies last week. On the second day, he paused to get fresh AA batteries to keep a GPS device working. But during the process, he said he somehow lost the bag in the lake.

It left him with only a wrist compass and the sky and waves to help him keep moving west.

"It was an accident, but it was my fault," Dreyer said of the lost batteries. “This is a tough pill to swallow.”

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