The Day the Whale Came

The real-life story of how the world's most famous female long-distance swimmer encountered a grey whale separated from its mother - and how she helped to reunite them. Lynne Cox is the author of Swimming to Antarctica, a memoir of her life as a swimmer. From the age of fourteen she has been breaking records for long-distance swimming, culminating in a mile-long swim in Antarctica, in zero degree water. When Lynne was 17, and on a training swim off the California mainland, she found herself swimming with a grey whale that had lost its mother. For the next seven hours, she swam with the whale - through pods of dolphin, and schools of sun-fish, between the pilings of a pier, and out to the base of an oil-rig, diving down as deeply as Lynne was able to, losing sight of the whale for minutes only to have it return and listen to its strange clicking and singing - in an increasingly desperate attempt to locate its mother.