A few weeks ago, a man swam from Quadra Island to Campbell River in an effort to raise some funds for the Quadra Island community centre.
Lucas Gentina made the swim on Sept. 15, after postponing it a few times due to weather. The goal was to swim from the lighthouse on the south end of the Island to the 50th Parallel on the Campbell River side — a distance of about 2.4 km — however, due to the active currents in that part of the ocean, Gentina ended up almost doubling that distance.
"It was closer to the 4.5 kilometre range," he said. "We timed it quite well, but at the end, the current started taking us and we just kind of had to land where we came close to the shore ... we drifted off a little bit towards Hidden Harbour there."
The water that day wasn't the coldest, about 10 degrees, but Gentina still teamed up with a safety crew, and had two support vessels in the water with him for his hour-long swim. He was aided by his friends from Captain Jay of Fierce Fish Ocean Adventures and Dave Skolnik.
"We've been working with the safety crew for about close to 6 months, almost 7 months. We've been doing a lot of work because it was all very weather dependent," Gentina said. "It was originally supposed to be on August 17th, and then we had a big wind storm that day. And then now we planned it for September 14th, and then we also had a big wind warning that day, and it was really rough. And obviously, you know, the conditions around here are pretty pretty crazy at times, right? And the currents are some of the the strongest currents in the world, right?"
So why would someone swim across a channel with some of the strongest currents in the world? Gentina did it to raise money for the Quadra Island Community Centre, and marine-inspired art workshops for youth on the Island.
"I have a company that that I built called Son of a Fish Art Collective. We have a GoFundMe page that that we started to raise funds so that we could do marine-inspired art workshops with the youth here on Quadra. We're doing a lot of different ocean-inspired activities and a lot of artworks just to get people connected with the ocean and show them how beautiful our local oceans are.
"And at the end, it's just going to help the community and and we're going to hopefully get as many youth involved into showing them how beautiful the ocean is, right?"
Gentina says he might be the first person to make the swim, and is definitely the first Chilean person to do it.
"To my knowledge, I'm the only person that's ever done that swim," he said. "I know for a fact that I'm the only Chilean do have done that swim in the history of the world. So that's kind of cool."
Gentina's GoFundMe is available here: gofundme.com/f/discovery-passage-swim-fundraiser.
