Having able to scribble on his note book every single detail of his sea adventure, Bell who celebrated his 70th birthday crossing the Tinian channel last month, lost his way while in the course of completing the fifth segment of circum-navigating Saipan.
Bell had just completed swimming 20 miles in four segments, along Saipan’s west shoreline from Sugar Dock to Wing Beach.
He wants to swim around the Saipan clockwise as he did on Guam during his active duty tour in US Navy in 1980. A year later, he swam from Saipan to Tinian to mark his retirement.
And after doing it again on his birthday on June 9, Bell who does not want to run out of something to challenge himself with, continued what he considers to be his own legacy.
“I feel I had not enough challenge in my life so I kept looking for one,” he said in a latest interview last Wednesday.
After going on with his latest segment over the weekend starting from the Wing Beach, Bell ended up so tired like he never been before because he had to swim an extra mile to find bring himself to the right track.
Bell said he figured out right away that the strong current that kept hitting the Banzai Cliff was so strong it carried him so many yards away from the line he tried to swim along on his way to the Bird Island.
“Banzai Cliff is a very chaotic area. There are big chunks of rocks that appeared to have cascaded to bottom of the ocean and the sound of the wave pounding the caves are very loud,” he said.
Bell said he was very aware the current that violently goes south before constantly taking a U-turn prevented him from going back to point with considerable distance to the shoreline.
Another thing that made the segment more difficult is that most stretch of the coast are cliffs the lowest of them are three to four feet from the water.
So there was no way to get out of water in case he decided not to go on.
All that was left to do was either finish what he started or swam back to Wing Beach which already more than three miles away.
Bell said that when one is caught in such kind of situation, getting discouraged or any subtle thought of stopping, “can kill you.”
So Bell hanged on and started to figure out how to get back on track.
“In an hour, you can tell if you make progress or already losing ground,” he said.
He knew the current kept him going backwards so instead of swimming towards shoreline, he had to swim a couple of hundreds yards off the coast to avoid he current. And upon reaching the point where the current dies that was when he could swim northern-east.
Doing that he said might have been a quarter of a mile before he could find himself right on track again.
Looking at a tree standing on top of Banzai Cliff, Bill could sense he was making progress.
Afterwards, he said he was having troubles figuring out exactly where the Bird Island was.
“I was anyway when you are swimming a shoreline it can be difficult to tell exactly when you have rounded a point. You are too close to get the bigger picture swimming a long cliff and raised shelf is very different than swimming a reef,” Bell said in his latest notes.
After being able to size up the situation, he started paddling and was already picking up with the currents until he reached the Bird Island where friend, Daniel Villegas was waiting to pick him up.
Bell took it seven hours to reach the north-east point of the Saipan.
“I was very tired by the end of the swim,” he said.
Bell told this part of his adventure to this reporter while went shopping at San Jose Mart Wednesday afternoon.
He grabbed two cups of yogurt, a pound of grape and bunches of vegetables for his dinner.
On Saturday again, he will be approaching the eastern water of Saipan in the next segment from Bird Island to Jeffrey’s Beach in Talafofo.
