Cuba To The Keys

Midway through her attempt to become the first person to swim from Cuba to the U.S., 22-year-old Susie Maroney confronted her biggest obstacle: darkness. "Seconds become hours; minutes become days," she says. "You can't see anything. Depression sets in. It is a loneliness you cannot imagine." To pass the night, Maroney mused on her favorite television programs and movies. "Toward sunrise I started having the most happy thoughts," she says. "Do you recall that Seinfeld episode where George pretends to be a marine biologist? I love that one. And I passed two more hours playing back every scene from my favorite movie, The Big Blue. It was just wonderful."

Maroney swam on, surrounded by a 20-by-8-by-8-foot shark cage that was being towed by the 65-foot trawler Acadian and attended to by a crew of nine. At 12:17 on the morning of May 12—24 hours and 34 minutes after she had dived off the Malecon seawall in Havana—she emerged from the surf at Fort Zachary Taylor State Park on Key West, the first person to have swum the treacherous 107 miles of open sea, profiting from ideal conditions to beat by nearly 16 hours her projected time.

Last June, in a failed attempt at the same swim, Maroney had become so seasick battling thunderstorms and 10-foot swells that she was unable to go more than 15 minutes without vomiting. This time when she reached the Gulf Stream, approximately 20 miles off Havana, she found calm seas and a brisk southeast wind. Maroney occasionally did become disoriented—once she thought she saw monkeys climbing the walls of the shark cage—but she did not lose her appetite. At the top of each hour, she took a minute to devour yogurt, mashed bananas, baby food and Gatorade. She eased the sting of jellyfish by applying gobs of Vaseline. "There was danger," Maroney says, "but I still much prefer it to swimming in a pool."

In fact, she laughingly calls a 48-km race around Manhattan in 1994 more perilous than the trek from Cuba. "Before the race we learned there was a dead body floating in the water," she says. "Then there were the dead rats that I kept swimming into."