Bet he was wishing he was still a Dolphin, would have made the swim a lot easier.
Seriously though, that’s an absolutely amazing feat of endurance.
Reminds me of former Test cricketers Matthew Hayden and Andrew Symonds’ excursion - but they had it easy by comparison.
Being in South Florida, this has been getting some air time locally. People are starting to question his story…but no one has come up with any reason for him to make it up.
He deserves something for that kind of feat.
Somebody throw him a fish.
Not exactly something you can fake.
But can he balance a beach ball on his nose?
That would be an ex-SEAL.
That sounds terrible. I know the human body can do some pretty incredible things in order to survive, but I have a hard time seeing myself come out of that situation alive.
There’s a story in Cheating Death: Amazing Survival Stories from Alaska about a fisherman who swam something like 29 hours going about 20 miles when his boat capsized. I’ve never been able to find any verification of it outside that book though.
But a dolphin joke wouldn’t have worked.
Balancing a dolphin on your nose? I don’t get the joke.
People swim the English channel so it’s certainly within the realm of human ability to swim 9, or even 20, miles. He could be exaggerating the distance, since only he knows how far he was from shore. Maybe it was 5 miles. But what he did is still something that a lot of people die trying to do.
And hey, don’t forget about Guðlaugur Friðþórsson. His story is freaking incredible!
The ex-Dolphin accidentally fell out of the boat?
I bet he did it on porpoise.
How could he tell which way to swim/ keep from swimming in circles?
Echo location
Technically, you could be a single mile from shore and end up swimming 100 miles worth of distance or 1/100th of a mile, depending on the direction and speed of the current.
I have actually seen a video of a real dolphin doing that. It won “behavior of the year award” at the 1983 (give or take a year or two?) annual conference of the International Marine Animal Trainers Association. (Okay, it was a volleyball, not a beach ball.)
(ETA: Okay, is that what the video linked by Sage Rat is showing? I can’t view videos on this mochine. At the time I saw the IMATA video back in (circa) 1983, it was an utterly unheard of thing for a dolphin to do.)
Seals (actually, California Sea Lions) can do that easily because they actually hold the ball in place with their vibrissae (whiskers). For a dolphin, it’s a real trick. I doubt any ex-dolphin could do it.
A video from 2014 of a dolphin balancing one of those “fitness balls” on his nose.
And not only balancing it, but carrying it back to the human from the other end of the pool.
A nine-mile swim, meanwhile, is quite doable by someone even moderately athletic, provided the waters are calm enough. There are some strokes that use almost no energy, so you can keep them up nearly indefinitely. It’d probably take you all day, but you’d get to shore eventually.
What kind of waves was he dealing with? And what water temperature?