She's going to do WHAT?!

Chesapeake swimmer ignoring perfectly good bridge
MIKE ARGENTO

Jun 9, 2006 —

Depending on who you ask, Danielle Suppa is going to do something either very cool or very insane Sunday afternoon.

She's going to jump into the Chesapeake Bay and swim to the other side.

You know, I mentioned to her, they have built a bridge across the bay.

"I heard that," she said. "I'm going to swim past it."

The state of Maryland went to all the trouble to build the William Preston Lane Jr. Memorial Bridge - also known as the Chesapeake Bay Bridge - and she's going to swim right past it. William Preston Lane Jr. is turning over in his grave. That is, if he's dead, which he probably is, considering it's a "memorial" bridge.

She won't be going it alone. She will be among about 600 swimmers participating in the 15th annual Great Chesapeake Bay Swim, described on its Web site as "one of America's premier open water swim challenges."

In other words, it's one of those lunacies that separates America from civilized places, like, say, Belgium, where they use bridges to cross large expanses of water. (I don't even know if Belgium has large expanses of water.)

It's a 4.4-mile swim across the bay from Sandy Point State Park, just north of Annapolis, to Kent Island on the Eastern Shore.

It's crazier than it sounds. It does help worthy causes - the March of Dimes and the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, among others. But still, we're not talking about venturing into the kiddy pool at Farquhar Park. According to the Web site, swimmers have to be wary of "the flailing arms and legs during the 'Cuisinart start,' cross currents, swells, chop, hypothermia if the water is cold and nettle stings if the water is warm."

Sounds like a lot of fun.

What would motivate a person do something like that?

"My niece is getting married at the end of the month," Danielle, 33, said, "and to fit in my dress, I decided to train and I needed a goal."

Dropping a dress size or so apparently wasn't enough of a goal. She had to go and swim across dead-whale-infested waters. (More on that later.)

Danielle had done some competitive swimming in high school and college. When she first began teaching at Red Lion Area High School - she teaches English - she coached swimming. In her hometown of Los Angeles, she had done some swims in the Pacific - nothing Iron-Man-triathlon-like. But she had experience swimming in a open body of unchlorinated water.

Swimming in the ocean is a little different than swimming in the bay. The bay doesn't have waves, but it does have currents. And the bay's lower salt content means less buoyancy, meaning it's easier to sink like an unsinkable ocean liner in the bay than in the ocean.

Fortunately, she said, she and the other 600 people who will be ignoring a perfectly good bridge Sunday will be swimming with the current. "They used to do (it across the current), but too many people didn't make it," she said.

And by didn't make it, she means swimmers who had to be picked up by the Coast Guard and ferried to shore, where they were ridiculed by the swimmers who made it.

She's been training for a while now, swimming laps in her school's pool three times a week, usually swimming a few miles at a time. Her husband, John Piermatteo, has been watching their two daughters, Annie, 5, and Zoe, 3, while she trained.

As a reward, John gets to wait for her arrival on Kent Island, spending the afternoon in Hemingway's, a bar/restaurant that hosts a huge party at the swim's terminus. "She's going to have to swim across the bay and then drive me home," he joked.

Danielle is a little concerned about the swim. She doesn't like the murkiness of the water and that she won't be able to see the bottom - staring into a watery abyss being much spookier than following a line painted on the bottom of a pool. And she's worried about the chemical composition of the bay; her friends have mentioned, repeatedly, how polluted the bay is.

"I don't want to wind up like that three-eyed fish from 'The Simpsons,'" she said.

She's also worried about bumping into a dead whale. In April, a container ship bound for the Port of Baltimore struck a 35-foot sei whale and dragged its carcass into the bay. We're talking 17,000 pounds of dead whale.

"That's not something I want to encounter," she said.

The bay is believed to be dead-whale-free, at least at the moment.

She hopes to finish the swim in two hours. The average is two hours and 25 minutes and the top swimmers - triathlon types - do it in an hour and 25 minutes.

Two hours in the water.

Sounds like fun.

She's doing it for the challenge and to be able to say she did it.

Her friends and family all think she's kind of insane for taking on this challenge. "My students think it's cool, though," she said.

They would.

Mike Argento, whose column appears Mondays and Thursdays in Living and Sundays in Viewpoints, can be reached at 771-2046 or at mike@ydr.com.