Mill Valley’s Locke Calls Aborted Farallon Swim ‘Hairy’

During his attempt to swim 30-miles through the cold, shark-filled waters of the Red Triangle last month, Mill Valley resident Joe Locke couldn’t see much.

But he could feel plenty.

“You can’t see anything out there – it’s all sense and feel,” Locke says. “I bumped into some things in the water and some stuff bumped into me. I don’t know what it was, but you have this feeling that you’re definitely not in the water alone. There was a lot of stuff in the water.”

Locke, a 42-year-old equity analyst with ABR Investment Strategy in San Francisco, was making the attempt in the hopes of becoming the second person ever to swim through the Golden Gate to the Farallon Islands, and the first in 44 years. Under a beaming full moon, he left the San Francisco Yacht Club in Belvedere at 1:30 a.m. and hoped to finish in about 15 hours.

Locke only made it about one-third of the way, largely because the conditions got so bad that his escort boat was in jeopardy.

“It just got hairy,” he said. “There were 18-foot-plus swells with whitecaps, and the boat was really getting tossed around. It got to a point where I didn’t have an escort boat, I had a bunch of guys who were just trying to stay afloat.”

They called it off at about the 10-mile mark, toward the end of the shipping channel. Locke said he felt pretty good, but the water conditions and the plummeting water temperature weren’t in his favor.

“When you get waves like that, it’s just not safe,” he said. “I have no death wish. I just want to enjoy it.”

Locke, who has been swimming competitively since he was 9 years old, is no stranger to marathon open water swims. He crossed the English Channel successfully in 2010. “There’s not a lot to it – pretty soon, you’re in France,” he said.

Locke is a member of the Night Train Swimmers, a non-profit organization that raises money for charity through swimming events. The group is led by Tiburon resident Vito Bialla and Phil Cutti and Paul Lundgren of Mill Valley, among others.

The organization raises money for causes like Wounded Warrior Project, Semper Fi Fund and Navy Seal Foundation, all of which support and empower wounded veterans. In late May, Night Train Swimmers’ mixed-gender relay team became the first to successfully swim through the Triangle. Two weeks later, the first all-female relay followed suit.

The last time someone swam across the whole route was in 1967, when swimmer Ted Erikson swam from the Farallon Islands in a time of 14 hours and 38 minutes.

Locke said he’s ready for another shot at the Farallon swim, but it’ll have to wait a while. Summertime is shark time in the Red Triangle.

“I don’t get in when it’s sharky – and it’s going to be pretty sharky for a while,” he said.