Three hours before the sun rises Sunday, 16-year-old Carolina Prieto of New Orleans will pull down her pink swim goggles and dive into the Caribbean Sea for the first leg of a 20-mile relay swim with her parents. If they make it from the island of Cozumel to the Mexican mainland, they’re told, it will be one of the few known successful crossings of the channel.
Carolina will be wearing a plain black swimsuit, with her face and limbs coated with sunscreen and Vaseline to protect her from sun and from the stings of jellyfish. A lighted tube connected to her head will stick above water, so that her location can always be seen, even in the dark.
As a woman who won gold medals at two different Summer Olympics, Ashley Tappin-Doussan knows how to push herself to the limit.
The waters have been a little choppy over the past few days; the Port of Cozumel was closed Saturday because of strong winds. So the family is a little concerned about the wind, currents and size of waves for their swim. But that’s not Carolina’s biggest worry.
“I have a huge fear of jellyfish,” she said Saturday. A few years ago, during a swim off North Carolina, she ended up in the hospital with thousands of jellyfish stings.
She has been trying to swim with jellyfish as she trains, so that she can brace herself emotionally for their stings. She also will have a credit card tucked under the strap of her swimsuit, to scrap away any jellyfish that stick to her while she swims.
But she still doesn’t want to see them coming. “Whenever I put my head in the water, I close my eyes,” she said.
Carolina Prieto, 16, poses Saturday, Dec. 26, 2020, in Cozumel, Mexico. (Photo from the Prieto family)
About a year ago, Carolina’s family moved from San Francisco to New Orleans, where she enrolled in Isidore Newman School. She hasn’t yet swum in open waters in Louisiana, because of concerns about pollution. But she will wear her green Newman swim team cap on Sunday as she rotates hour-long stints with her father, Mauricio Prieto, 53, and her mother, Susan Moody Prieto, 49. Depending on the conditions, the swim could take 12 to 16 hours.
Though the Cozumel Channel’s waters are balmy, around 85 degrees F., its Gulf Stream currents and winds be challenging. The swim is sometimes called “the Mexican English Channel,” because it’s similar in distance and difficulty to swimming’s iconic cold-water challenge between England and France.
Carolina considers the Cozumel swim a training run for her eventual attempt at the English Channel itself.
She made her first long-distance swim at age 11, when crossing the frigid, rough waters between Alcatraz Island and San Francisco to raise money for breast cancer. Inspiration came from her mother, a breast-cancer survivor.
Carolina Prieto, 16, is flanked by her parents Susan and Mauricio Prieto, on Saturday, Dec. 26, 2020, in Cozumel, Mexico. (Photo from the Prieto family)
This time, she chose a charity connected to her paternal roots in Mexico. Through GoFundMe sponsors of her family’s swim, Carolina has raised more than $6,000 for the New Orleans Hispanic Heritage Foundation, which provides high school and college scholarships to Hispanic students. She considers her swim “a small way to give back to a community that has given so much to the city,” she said, referencing the way that Hispanic workers helped to rebuild the New Orleans area after Hurricane Katrina.
While it’s still dark Sunday morning, Carolina will take off from the Cozumel shore swimming the front-crawl stroke. A boat carrying her parents will ride to her left. After her father and mother swim the second and third leg, Carolina will slip into the water again from the boat, which no one can touch while they are swimming, according to marathon swimming rules.
And if she looks away from the boat, all she can see is the sea and the sky.
“It’s pretty overwhelming. You’re a tiny person in a huge ocean. But that’s what makes it even cooler,” Carolina said, recalling a recent night on the beach in Cozumel as she looked toward the Yucatan Peninsula. “I was looking at where I was about to swim, and I couldn’t even see the other side. So it seemed like a never-ending swim, but I think that’s what makes it really cool.”
