Turning the tide

It wasn’t the sharks that perturbed Lauren Tischendorf the most. Nor was it seasickness, being in the water for the duration of a couple of school days, hunger, dehydration or soreness.

But six hours into her record-breaking swim to circumnavigate Lord Howe Island this year, something far more mundane threatened to derail the Glenmore Road Public School teacher from meeting her goal. It was the current.

As Tischendorf battled one of the more treacherous stretches of her journey around the island — a task that, if accomplished, would make her the first woman ever to do so — the tide suddenly turned, making her progress almost impossible. For several hours she struggled for every precious metre. As time ticked by, she remained marooned, seemingly in the one spot.

“We just were not moving, in fact I was moving backwards,” she recalls. “I just kept on going, changing my angle and the way I was swimming through the current.”

In a testament to her perseverance and determination, Tischendorf kept swimming, until the current turned and she was able to start moving forward again.

“Eventually it changed and I got around the bottom of the island,” she says.

Tischendorf set out on the swim marathon on the morning of April 20. Amazingly, swimming around the island located 600km due east of Port Macquarie had remained one of world long-distance swimming’s remaining challenges, a task more mammoth even than swimming the English Channel.

At 35km, the swim pips the Channel’s 33.7km (though the water temperature of the North Sea is 5-10 degrees colder than it is in the Pacific).

Tischendorf began ocean swimming a few years back, finding she had a talent for it.

“I have always been a swimmer but living in Sydney I took up ocean swimming,” she says. “In the past few years, I have done a lot more competitive swimming and ended up first in my age group for NSW for 2019-20.

“Then COVID came and ocean swimming was a way of catching up with friends and getting out and about while being COVID safe. I ended up swimming 135km a month. My coach said, ‘That’s a lot of training. People who swim the Channel do that.’ Lord Howe Island came up as an option because it’s within the NSW state border, and I thought, ‘It’s good to have a challenge’.”

Leading up to the swim, Tischendorf scoped maps, traced the currents and got in touch with locals who could help her figure out the best route. She hoped to be the first person, man or woman, to make the treacherous journey. But in February, another swimmer, an Australian man, got there narrowly before her.

“That was so disappointing. The goal was to be the first person, not only the first woman. But (the setback) made me make sure I got there in April — it didn’t matter to me about the conditions.”

Tischendorf set out at 6.50am for her epic swim, with the plan that she would be back in the harbour by sundown for a well-deserved gin and tonic, or two. Supported by her parents and a team that followed her on a boat monitoring for sharks and other problems, the first part of the swim went well.

But by midday she was stuck in the current changes that left her hours behind her projected finish time. In the end, she rounded the island and ended up heading on the last leg of the swim in the dark.

“Towards the end, I was swimming towards the lights (of the township),” she says. “All I wanted to do was finish.”

She ended up completing the swim at 8.40pm after close to 15 gruelling hours at sea.

“What should have taken me 10 hours on a smooth day took more than 14. I had jelly legs when I got out and I was slightly delirious from dehydration but I felt really good. All I wanted to do was have a shower.”

The most important thing was that the record was set — Tischendorf is now recorded as the first woman to swim around Lord Howe Island.

She says while parts of the journey were a touch frightening — she swam over tiger and Galapagos sharks and at one point was startled by a pair of giant kingfish — she would definitely do the swim again, in an attempt to cut her time.

For now, though, she is making a short documentary of the event, to be screened locally, and is back in the water swimming around Bondi and Coogee. She is proud of her huge achievement and hopes her swim can be an inspiration to female swimmers, including her Glenmore Rd students.

“I like the idea of doing something that might give young girls the idea of testing their skills and testing themselves,” Tischendorf says.

Making waves

The film of Tischendorf’s swim will feature at the Women’s Adventure Film festival this September.

womensadventurefilmtour.com/australia

laurentischendorf.com

Insta: @nextepicadventure_lt21