British-South African endurance athlete Lewis Pugh officially finished his 62-mile, 12-day swim around the Massachusetts island of Martha’s Vineyard on Monday, becoming the first person to accomplish the feat. Pugh made the landmark attempt to change people’s perception of sharks.
Swim around Martha’s Vineyard
Pugh began swimming multiple hours a day in the 47-degree water on May 15 to raise awareness about the plight of sharks as the film “Jaws” nears its 50th anniversary. He said he wants to change public perceptions and encourage protections for the at-risk animals – which he said the film maligned as “villains” and “cold-blooded killers.”
“It was a film about sharks attacking humans, and for 50 years, we have been attacking sharks,” he said before plunging into the ocean near the Edgartown Lighthouse. “It’s madness. We need to respect them.”
Pugh, 55, depicted this as one of his most difficult endurance swims, which is saying a lot for someone who has swum near glaciers and volcanoes and among hippos, crocodiles and polar bears. Pugh was the first athlete to swim across the North Pole and complete a long-distance swim in every one of the world’s oceans.
“I’ve been swimming now for 40 years, and this was one of the toughest swims of my life. It was the cold. It was the wind. It was the waves, the distance. If that wasn’t enough, you add on top of it you’re constantly looking down into the dark, black water and thinking about what may be beneath me,” Pugh told WBZ-TV.
He said that a significant part of the swim’s difficulty was mental due to the fact that he was hyper-aware of sharks in the water.
But Pugh, who often swims to raise awareness for environmental causes – he’s been named a United Nations Patron of the Oceans – said no swim is without risk, and that drastic measures are needed to get his message across: Around 274,000 sharks are killed globally each day – a rate of nearly 100 million every year, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
“It’s completely unsustainable, it’s an ecocide happening right now,” Pugh continued. “We are the last generation that has the opportunity now to protect them and to save them ”
Iconic “Jaws” movie
“Jaws,” which was filmed in Edgartown, renamed Amity Island for the movie, created Hollywood’s blockbuster culture when it was released in summer 1975, setting box office records and earning three Academy Awards. The movie would shape views of the ocean for decades to come.
Both director Steven Spielberg and author Peter Benchley expressed regret that viewers of the film became so afraid of sharks, and both later contributed to conservation efforts as shark populations declined, largely due to commercial fishing.
“I want people to be able to look at sharks very, very differently. They are apex predators, and they are absolutely essential for a healthy ocean. They keep our ocean in balance. What jaws did was create this culture of fear that sharks are out to get us as humans, and we know that’s not the case,” Pugh told WBZ-TV.
Day after day, Pugh has entered the island’s frigid waters wearing just trunks, a cap, and goggles, enduring foul weather as a nor’easter dumped 7 inches of rain on parts of New England and flooded streets on Martha’s Vineyard. He told WBZ-TV that some days he could only swim one mile due to the harsh waves, which meant he had to swim even harder to make his Memorial Day deadline.
Pugh’s endeavor also coincides with the New England Aquarium’s first confirmed sighting this season of a white shark, off the nearby island of Nantucket. Just in case, he’s accompanied by safety personnel in a boat and a kayak, whose paddler is using a “Shark Shield” device to create a low-intensity electric field in the water to deter sharks without harming them.
“I’m not saying it’s safe to swim with sharks. What I’m saying is sharks are really threatened and that we need to be protecting them,” Pugh finished.