On 9/11, A San Diego Woman Swam From Catalina To LA

SAN PEDRO, CA — Somewhere miles off the coast of San Pedro, 21 years ago, at about 6:30 a.m., someone heard Andrea Halligan exclaim that she felt awesome.

Halligan, 45 at the time, had been swimming for about six hours in 66-degree water in the middle of the night. But the near constant movement through the miles of black, chilly water made her feel hot and puffy. Her face was red, her lips were swollen, and her fingers were prunes. All she could taste was salt. She had just overcome a bout of nausea caused by the diesel fumes of the accompanying boat. The end, sweet terra firma, was in sight, at least psychologically. She was about to complete the 22-mile swim from Santa Catalina Island to mainland San Pedro.

Around the time Halligan started to feel better, and then awesome, her cadre of three kayakers, four pace swimmers, and team of well-wishers stopped cheering. Her mom was watching TV in the bottom of the accompanying boat, called the “Bottom Scratcher.” Soon the others on the boat went to join her.

Andrea Halligan happened to swim one of the world’s most iconic channels in the early hours of September 11, 2001. While she was gliding through the crystal clear open water, hundreds of people were freefalling in the open air to escape a ballooning blaze of fire.

Halligan sensed the shift on some level, but she was in the zone, thinking about little else other than the mechanics of her stroke. “I was concentrating on my goal - get across that channel,” she said. “I never even asked where they all went. Till much later. Shows you where the mind of the swimmer is. On herself, as it probably should be.”

The zen concentration paid off. About two hours later, Halligan finished the swim in exactly eight hours, 33 minutes, and 18 seconds, according to official records: one of the best recorded times for a woman her age. She was the 99th person in the world to successfully swim the channel since the Catalina Channel Swimming Federation started keeping records in 1927.

She got back on the boat feeling “high as a kite.”

“The smile is elation and contentment of reaching that elusive goal,” Halligan wrote years later of a photo taken right after she finished. “One cannot imagine this unless they do it. I think I cried some tears of joy right after this shot.”

Tears were shed across the world that morning. When she got back onto the boat, the captain played “Amazing Grace” on bagpipes.

Five minutes later, Coast Guard agents inspected the boat.

“I looked at my buddy Chris, and said, why is the Coast Guard on our boat?” Halligan said. “He said, oh, they’re checking for weed. He’s a fast thinker, god.”

The agents then left to check every other boat coming into the port. Halligan, still “high as a kite” - from the flood of endorphins that accompany the accomplishment of an important life goal, not weed, mind you - invited her crew to breakfast, as is custom.

No one wanted to go. They told her they were really tired, but maybe some other time. Halligan and her husband Bill got in the car to go home, but not before he raced to put in a Rolling Stones CD so that she wouldn’t hear the radio. At around 1 p.m., she was still wired with energy and watering plants in the backyard of their San Diego home. Bill told her to take a nap: she had been awake at least 36 hours.

About two hours later, she woke up and turned on the TV. “My stomach just went down to my feet,” she said. “I thought, you know what? This is a hell of a lot more important than a stinking little swim across a channel.”

I felt horrible. I have empathy for all the people who were killed. It was a painful thing to realize,” she said.

All these years later, Halligan says she’s happy her team granted her momentary blissful ignorance so she could savor the moment she’d worked so hard to achieve.

“Those guys were so good at hiding it that it didn’t ruin my moment at all,” she said. “They let me have my time to jump up and down. I thought it was such a selfless thing to do to not tell me.”

And if she had booked the boat for September 12?

“I just can’t answer that,” Halligan said. “My bro had already flown out, my crew would have been ready, but knowing what I know now, I’m not sure I could have swum. That is a tough one. If my crew wasn’t 100 percent behind me, it could not have happened. If they were somehow were not able to be there for me, I would have known it and canceled. It’s about my team. Couldn’t have done it without them for sure.”

After she turned on the TV, Halligan says her swim was suddenly far from her mind. A local newscaster planning to interview her called to tell her she had too much else to do for the foreseeable future.

“I said no problem! I said you got a lot more important things to cover on that TV than me. And I always took it in stride that I did it for me - I didn’t do it for others to know about. It was just because I wanted to do it.”

Halligan, now 66, started swimming when she was nine years old. She took classes at the YMCA in her native Pacific Palisades. At first, the chances she would one day zip through 22 miles of open ocean in the depths of night seemed remote. “I was terrible. All of a sudden I was 10, I was even worse,” she laughed. “By the time I was 11 or 12 I started to figure out how to improve so I swam competitively until after college.”

In the 70s, she obtained one of the first Title IX sports scholarships to UCLA and qualified for the Olympic trial time standard for the 800-meter freestyle. Just before the 1976 Olympics, she came down with mono, and felt she wasn’t up to competing. She quit swimming for a while.

About a decade later, after she moved to San Diego, she started to swim again.

“I started swimming in the pool, and then I started swimming in the ocean, and I was pretty damn good in the ocean,” she said. “I just loved it. It was so much more freeing than looking at the bottom of the pool.”

Swimming clubs in San Diego sponsored a number of one, five and ten-mile ocean races, and Halligan distinguished herself. “These guys I was swimming with at UCSD kept saying, 'Andy, you could swim a channel,' and all of a sudden I started getting it into my head I might be able to do this,” she said. After all, what’s another 10 miles?

Halligan decided she would attempt a swim across the Catalina Channel, and booked a boat for September 11, which would have temperate weather and still allow the commercial boat to enjoy its Labor Day tourist windfall.

She began training in December 2000 by spending an hour in frigid ocean water around San Diego. She began adding on more time until she was able to swim eight hours around La Jolla Cove in August 2001. She practiced training in intervals of five minutes of intense swimming, followed by 8 ounces of fluid, then fifteen minutes of leisurely swimming. Then she rested for three weeks.

Just after midnight on 9/11, which at that point in global history was still simply referred to as 'the 11th,' or 'Tuesday,' Halligan and her posse arrived at Doctor’s Cove, a popular starting point due to its calm, protected conditions. The majority of swims begin in the middle of the night in the hopes of finishing before the afternoon winds arrive, and that night was calm and clear. With the support of pacing swimmers, kayakers, and a boat with her husband, parents, brother, and coach, Halligan set off into the black abyss.

She mostly remembers the hypnotic repetition of swimming “like a metronome” for twenty minutes, then stopping for a feed. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

“To me the hardest part of channel swimming is the focus: to have the mental and physical capacity to keep going. I think my mind was way stronger than my body,” she said.

The trip required generous amounts of every kind of strength. Early on, a kayaker ran over her foot, according to an account published by Dr. Penny Dean, a world-famous swimmer who currently holds the world record for the fastest Catalina Channel swim.

About three hours in, Halligan got stung by a jellyfish on the underside of her arms. That hurt, but with her trademark nonchalance, she noted that jellyfish are far preferable to the sharks prowling the channel. Records show that long-distance swimmers have spotted several sharks over the decades, but they either swam away or were deterred before any attacks could happen.

A few hours later, she got nauseous from diesel fumes blowing in her face, but that subsided after she repositioned herself in relation to the boat. The boat also reportedly had engine problems, and was briefly blocked by a large container ship.

But Halligan’s mental game was strong, and to the beat of the ticking metronome, she followed the famous advice of a fellow fish: “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming.”

After she landed, Halligan joined the rest of the world in facing one of the cruelest mental tests ever devised. But she says the channel swim taught her that any challenge can be accomplished with the right attitude.

“It changed every aspect of my life. Any sort of challenge, I figure I’ll figure out a way, or it wasn’t the right challenge. If you talk to people who have done something, there’s a way. That to me is the joy of accomplishing one of those channel swims,” she said.

Two years later, she swam 20 miles across the English Channel, which she describes as far more difficult than Catalina due to rougher waters and more unpredictable currents. Then she retired from swimming to care for her ailing mother and helped her husband manage his dental practice. She has since retired and moved deep into the mountains, into a small town near Mammoth Lake, where she approaches hiking with a similar zeal.

“Everyone kept saying you’re gonna leave the ocean?” she said. “I said 'yup.' I love to hike probably more than I love to swim, and, in San Diego, everything was getting so much more crowded. It just seemed over the 30 years we were there, I always wanted to go away and be quiet.”

On her 21st “channelversary,” as she calls it, Halligan remembers both the joy of her swim and the hideous trauma of its arbitrary calendar date.

“You have to think of both,” she said. “I don’t think you can separate them, because they both happened together. To me it’s like, wow, I’ll remember that date as long as I live.”