A small group of swimmers set out on a 10-mile swim from Coney Island to Red Hook on July 25 — carving out a path along Brooklyn’s western shore.
“It was great! It was a wonderful swim,” said Juliet Kadlecek, a member of the Coney Island Brighton Beach Open Water Swimmers (CIBBOWS), a group that holds races and swim meets in Brooklyn’s open waters.
Kadlecek and three other swimmers set out on the expedition on Saturday morning, taking off from Coney Island at 9:30 am, and arriving at Red Hook’s Valentino Pier about four hours later. The swim aimed to test the route’s viability for a larger CIBBOWS outing — and the group gave the path the thumbs-up, Kadlecek said.
“It will be something that a bunch of swimmers do together,” she said. “[We] might try to make it bigger even with more swimmers.”
To ensure the swimmers’ safety, a small vessel accompanied the group to alert boat traffic of the swimmers’ whereabouts and to come to the swimmers’ aid if something went wrong.
Aside from a brief encounter with a pile of trash underneath the Verrazzano Bridge, the day went swimmingly, Kadlecek said.
“Unfortunately, there was a little garbage when we came out underneath the Verrazzano,” she said. “But when there wasn’t, it was a beautiful swim.”
Kadlecek, a California native who now lives in Manhattan, says she travels to Brighton Beach almost every day to swim before work. Most of CIBBOWS’s racing and swimming events have been canceled in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, but she enjoys the smaller swimming events that the group still hosts, she said.
“This season’s a little odd because usually they have many more events, and they do host races but none of those could happen this season because of COVID,” Kadlecek said, adding that the Saturday outing was a nice way for the swimmers to come together. “It was great.”
