From inspired and inspiring open-water swimmer and supreme athlete, able to endure cold water temperatures that would kill others, author of Swimming to Antarctica ("Riveting" —Sports Illustrated) and Grayson ("Moving, mystical" —People)—a powerful book about super athleticism and human frailty, about invincibility and the sudden (mind-altering) repercussions of illness, and about the triumph of spirit, surrender, and love.Lynne Cox is an elite athlete who broke many world records, among them swimming the English Channel at fifteen, being the first woman to swim across Cook Strait (eighteen miles), and being the first to swim off Antarctica in 32-degree water—for twenty-five minutes!—all without a wetsuit. And that's where Swimming in the Sink begins—at a laboratory at the University of London, with Cox's hand in ice-cold water, hooked up to thermocouples and probes, with three scientists trying to make...

Roald Amundsen, "the last of the Vikings," left his mark on the Heroic Era as one of the most successful polar explorers ever. A powerfully built man more than six feet tall, Amundsen's career of adventure began at the age of fifteen (he was born in Norway in 1872 to a family of merchant sea captains and rich ship owners); twenty-five years later he was the first man to reach both the North and South Poles.Lynne Cox, adventurer and swimmer, author of Swimming to Antarctica ("gripping" --Sports Illustrated) and Grayson ("wondrous, and unforgettable" --Carl Hiaasen), gives us in South with the Sun a full-scale account of the explorer's life and expeditions.We see Amundsen, in 1903-06, the first to travel the Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, in his small ship Gjøa, a seventy-foot refitted former herring boat powered by sails and a thirteen-horsepower engine, making his way through the...

Grayson is Lynne Cox's first book since Swimming to Antarctica ("Riveting"-_Sports Illustrated;_ "Pitch-perfect"-_Outside_). In it she tells the story of a miraculous ocean encounter that happened to her when she was seventeen and in training for a big swim (she had already swum the English Channel, twice, and the Catalina Channel). It was the dark of early morning; Lynne was in 55-degree water as smooth as black ice, two hundred yards offshore, outside the wave break. She was swimming her last half-mile back to the pier before heading home for breakfast when she became aware that something was swimming with her. The ocean was charged with energy as if a squall was moving in; thousands of baby anchovy darted through the water like lit sparklers, trying to evade something larger. Whatever it was, it felt large enough to be a white shark coursing beneath her body.It wasn't a shark. It became clear that it was a baby gray whale-following alongside Lynne for a mile or so. Lynne had been swimming for more than an hour; she needed to get out of the water to rest, but she realized that if she did, the young calf would follow her onto shore and die from collapsed lungs.The baby whale-eighteen feet long!-was migrating on a three-month trek to its feeding grounds in the Bering Sea, an eight-thousand-mile journey. It would have to be carried on its mother's back for much of that distance, and was dependent on its mother's milk for food-baby whales drink up to fifty gallons of milk a day. If Lynne didn't find the mother whale, the baby would suffer from dehydration and starve to death.Something so enormous-the mother whale was fifty feet long-suddenly seemed very small in the vast Pacific Ocean. How could Lynne possibly find her?This is the story-part mystery, part magical tale-of what happened . . .