HOPING TO BE TUFF ENOUGH | Jamestown Press – Jamestown Press

Its going to be tough, but the man with the perfectly suited surname has no doubts about swimming nonstop from Block Island to Beavertail Point.

Ben Tuff, a lifelong summer resident of Jamestown, will make his 19-mile attempt Saturday to raise money for Clean Ocean Access, a Middletown nonprofit organization that preserves and protects Narragansett Bay. He is the same man who swam continuously, without a wetsuit, around Conanicut Island in August 2019, a 23-mile circumnavigation that took him nine hours and seven minutes. Tuff estimates the shorter swim across Rhode Island Sound will take longer because the waves will be choppier during his offshore attempt than the coastal swells inside the bay. Tuff, 41, expects to reach his adopted hometown in about 10 hours, 45 minutes, with a half-hour window on both ends.

I have no doubts, he said. When it comes to something like this, youd never be able to do it if there were any doubts in your head.

Despite the swim around Jamestown being really brutal for those last 3 miles, the proposition of swimming from New Shoreham came when the circumnavigation was fresh in his mind.

I thought about it the night after I swam around the island, he said. I was thinking about how much it sucked to swim around Jamestown. Then I looked at a map.

Tuff has been training daily for about a year with practices intensifying each week, and that included a 12.5-mile swim around Key West in June, which marveled the competition because it was practice for him.

This is your training swim? they would tell him. Weve been training for this.

While the swim around Conanicut Island generated local press, the pending swim from Block Island has gone national. From the pages of USA Today to the Houston Chronicle, the hype has extended to the airwaves, including a television interview with The Weather Channel. Tuff, a director of admissions at a private boarding school in Connecticut, said publicizing this swim has been like a second job. Thats because this attempt has something the first swim did not, which was best summed by his mother, Pat Tuff, on the fundraising page of the Clean Ocean Access website.

Good luck, Ben, she wrote. I am so proud of what you are doing but, naturally, as your mother, I am nervous of that big long swim and all the creatures in the sea.

Beware of sharks

The creatures that she is referring to are sharks, and that includes great whites. According to the Atlantic Shark Institute in Wakefield, 14 sharks related to the Jaws antagonist have been recorded off the coast of Block Island using acoustic receiver devices since the study began in 2019, and that includes four of the predators this summer. To ease moms concerns, however, Tuff will be wearing a device from the technology company Ocean Guardian, an Australian manufacturer that has invented the worlds only proven shark deterrent. He will wear the device, which creates an electromagnetic field to deter sharks, for the entire swim.

There are sharks everywhere, he said. Its a calculated risk anytime you get in the water. Just like when you go hiking in the woods, you might see a bear.

Even without the device, Tuff seems ho-hum about the threat of sharks, saying the predatorial fish in Rhode Island are not like the ones that make headlines off the coast of Cape Cod.

If you are really into ultramarathons, there are lots of swims that are much more sharky than this one. Most of these sharks in those waters are cruising around. The sharks around here grab a seal and theyre happy. Its not like in the Cape where they are just constantly looking for food.

If there is an emergency, Tuff will be escorted by three friends. The boats will be captained by local lobsterman Alex Perkins and Tristan Raynes, a Jamestown native who captains the charter boat Ohana.

They know these waters better than anyone around, he said.

The third escort will be his crazy buddy Jake Lindley on a paddleboard. When Tuff was applying for the swim through the U.S. Coast Guard, which will escort him through the sticky, busy areas, Lindley, who followed his friend around Conanicut Island during the circumnavigation, was a source of confusion.

Everything seems to be in order, the Coast Guard told Tuff, except for this paddleboard guy. What the heck is up with him?

Far from shore

Swimming away from the shore has its ups and downs, Tuff said. Because of the current, he wont be swimming in a straight line the entire time, and it will look like hes swimming toward Point Judith. Not knowing how far you are from the finish line, however, is a positive.

It definitely will freak me out a little bit more, but for me, its actually better, he said. When you get away from the shore, you dont have any point of reference. When I swam around the island, I was thinking, Oh my god, Im not even at the Jamestown Bridge yet. What the hell. I still got to get around the north end. But on the swim from Block Island, I wont know where I am for hours. I got that going for me.

The proposition of swimming from Block Island to Beavertail caught the attention of Elizabeth Beisel, a North Kingstown High School graduate, and Olympic swimmer. She has scheduled a swim for Aug. 30 from Point Judith to Block Island to raise money for cancer research after one of her close family members was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Beisel reached out to Tuff, and the two met before she left for Tokyo to report on the Olympics for NBC Sports.

Ill be done with my swim by the time she gets back, he said. She wants to download some information from my swim. An Olympic medalist asking me for help? Its crazy. I started swimming eight years ago.

Tuff, the father of two, Wyatt, 14, and Maisie, 12, calls Jamestown his home, although it is not that straightforward. His family made the local connection through Mist, the Racquet Road cottage established by Adm. Herbert Seymour Howard, his mothers grandfather, and Tuff made his first appearance when he was 3 weeks old. Although he led a relatively nomadic life, following his father, a venture capitalist, from Ohio to Toronto to Boston to Atlanta, it did cause a dilemma when he was asked to write an essay about his hometown.

I dont have one, he told his mother.

Yes, you do, she replied. Write about Jamestown.

Now Tuff is looking forward to swimming to his hometown to raise money to protect the water that surrounds it.

I feel good, he said. In the end, when you have challenges like this, you can only do so much to prepare. Its 90 percent mind over matter. Once you get past hour five, you start to hurt no matter how much you prepare. I dont think Id have the drive to finish if I werent doing it for something that I really believe in.

Here is the original post:

HOPING TO BE TUFF ENOUGH | Jamestown Press - Jamestown Press