Swimming the 38-mile length of Cayuga Lake: A fundraiser for mental health

Claire de Boer and Bridgette Hobart share a life-long passion for long-distance swims. To de Boer, swimming is akin to a spiritual experience, which makes her feel at peace and keeps her bonded to family history. For Hobart, propelling through the water is a gift that drives her forward in meeting life’s challenges.

The friends will attempt a joint milestone in their respective aquatic accomplishments on August
8-9: a relay swim the entire 38-mile length of Cayuga Lake, which will begin under a Sturgeon
Moon and end some 20 hours later well before the sun begins to set the next day.

Their “Cayuga Swim for Mental Health” is a fundraiser for a cause that is dear to both women.
They will swim in honor of de Boer’s nephew Rowan and Hobart’s nephew Corey, young men
who tragically died by suicide in recent years.

De Boer and Hobart will donate the monies collected to The Sophie Fund, a local nonprofit that
supports mental health initiatives aiding young people in the Ithaca area. The organization is
named for Sophie Hack MacLeod, a Cornell University fine arts student who took her own life in
Ithaca in 2016.

“My hope is our message inspires others to not give up, bring awareness to groups available for
support,” said Hobart, 62, a business and technology consultant, who founded Dogged
Perseverance, Inc., a nonprofit supporting animal rescue and K9 organizations.

“It hurts my heart deeply when young people suffer with mental health challenges and feel
ashamed or uncomfortable about getting help. We selected The Sophie Fund because of its
award-winning strategies to effectively support young adults in Ithaca and Tompkins County,”
said de Boer, 64, an Arts in Health consultant who is currently developing an Immigrant and
Refugee Artist collective.

The swim brings the women’s long-standing connections to Cayuga Lake full circle: De Boer, an
Ithaca native who lives in Mount Gretna, PA, completed a solo swim in 1984 while attending
Cornell University; Hobart, who grew up in Binghamton and lives in Rock Stream on Seneca
Lake and in Lake Hopatcong, NJ, did so three decades later, in 2015. Both swims are officially
logged by the Marathon Swimmers Federation (MSF), as are those of two other Cayuga solo
finishers, David Barra also in 2015 and Caroline Block in 2018.

For this swim, de Boer and Hobart will enter the water near the village of Cayuga at the north
end of the lake at 8 p.m. on August 8. They will take turns with one-hour stretches until they
reach Allan H. Treman State Marine Park in Ithaca mid-to-late-afternoon on Aug. 9.

They will swim in adherence to MSF relay swim rules, which allow no wetsuit nor buoyancy
devices and an hourly scheduled change of swimmer, which must take place in the water. They
will have a support boat accompanying them, as well as a kayaker for each of their swim turns.

Swimming the length of Cayuga Lake presents challenges, due to the great distance, winds,
waves, currents, knots of seaweed, harmful algal blooms, and the occasional waterlogged tree
branch. Hypothermia should also be a concern for de Boer and Hobart; although the lake water
temperature can climb to the low 70s in August, getting in and out of the water repeatedly
presents challenges in maintaining body heat.

The experienced marathoners are undeterred.

“When I swim, I listen to the sound of the bubbles, I watch the light playing in the water, and I
smell the vegetation. It is a meditative experience, and I am totally in the moment almost all of
the time,” said de Boer.

“Cayuga Lake is almost a spiritual experience. I feel deeply connected to it in ways that are
difficult to describe. It has to do with family history, given all of the time our family spent on the
water while I was growing up. It is also an inexplicable feeling of peace that I get when I am in
the lake,” she added.

Although de Boer enjoys other endurance sports including cycling, trail running, hiking, and
cross-country skiing, she says that she is most at home in the water with a suit, cap, and goggles.

She has swum several unofficial long distances in Maine and the Netherlands, and been part of
United States Masters Swimming competitions for many years.

When she was named High School Athlete of the Week in 1979, Hobart told the Binghamton Sun-Bulletin that she had started swimming at age 11, and planned to swim the English Channel 50 years later when she turned 61. She made good on the boast, albeit a little earlier at age 51.

On September 18, 2014, Hobart crossed the channel from Samphire Hoe near Dover to Cap Gris Nez in France in 13 hours 28 minutes.

After the English Channel triumph, Hobart had the idea to swim all of the swimmable Finger
Lakes in one season, which is how she and de Boer met. As she planned her feat on Cayuga Lake in 2015, a mutual acquaintance connected her to de Boer for advice about the 38-mile challenge.

On the day of the swim, de Boer followed Hobart’s journey through a GPS tracker. Discovering
that Hobart was making good progress, de Boer interrupted a Maine vacation, hopped in her car, drove 400 miles to Ithaca, commandeered a boat, and dove into the lake to bring Hobart home.

De Boer and Hobart talked about doing a Cayuga Lake relay together for years, finally deciding
that the 10th anniversary of Hobart’s 2015 solo swim presented the right moment—and an
opportunity to find purpose out of their family tragedies.

“It was an experience I will never forget. Since my 2015 swim, Claire and I have done many
swims, lost our fathers around the same time, our mothers, and then we each lost a nephew to
suicide. This Cayuga relay swim is coming together to bring awareness and raise funds in
memory of our nephews to support mental health,” Hobart said.