Heartbreaking end for girl’s attempt to break Lake Ontario record

Maya Farrell, 14, tried to be the youngest person to swim across Lake Ontario, but lightning stopped her close to the shore.
After a gruelling 23 hours in the water, 14-year-old Maya Farrell was swimming into the teeth of a thunderstorm.
At 7 p.m. Wednesday night and a mere 300 metres from dry land at the tip of the Leslie Street Spit, Farrell and her crew were hit by heavy rain and howling winds, risking her chances of being the youngest swimmer ever to cross Lake Ontario.
Nearly crying with frustration, Maya started punching the waves that crashed continually over her head.
She had been sprinting all out for nearly two hours, trying to beat the storm.
“It was awful,” she said Thursday afternoon. “I couldn’t see anything. I felt like I was going nowhere.”
Three hours earlier, her father knew it would be a race against the clock. In the support boats, he and swim master Miguel Vadillo could see the storm clouds ahead better than Maya could.
“We knew that storm was coming,” Scoppa said. “Miguel said, ‘You can’t stop anymore. I need you to do this last three hours in an hour and a half.’ She just put her head down and went.”
At around the same time, I was forming a plan with my editors, hoping to document Maya’s entry into the record books. Deadline was looming and the Leslie Street Spit is closed to traffic during the week.
In order to catch Maya at the end of her journey, I’d have to run the entire five kilometres. On deadline. With 20 pounds of camera gear. In 35-degree heat. I was about to protest when I choked the words back. At that moment a teenager was swimming her heart out after 21 hours in a freezing lake with little food and no sleep. I didn’t really have much to complain about.
Standing on the shore an hour later, I could see her support boats zigzagging slowly but steadily towards me. They were being tossed about like toys in the stiffening wind. Scott Gervais, a friend of Maya’s family, was with me.
“It’s pouring rain at the beaches right now,” he said. I glanced over my shoulder at the black clouds looming over downtown Toronto.
“She’d better hurry if she’s going to beat that storm,” I said, as the first heavy drops splashed onto my back.
Scott just nodded gravely.
Out in the boats, things were getting tense. Maya’s support crew couldn’t decide which way to go. She lost time swimming first east, then west, then east again, trying to navigate the swirling wind.
“It was really nerve wracking,” Scoppa said. “I couldn’t believe what was happening. It was hailing. We were screaming at her to go, and she was sprinting as hard as she could for about the last 40 minutes.”
Gervais and I watched for an hour as she tried desperately to close the final few hundred metres. Stan Rogers’ lyrics started rolling through my head:
“I told that kid a hundred times, Don’t take the Lakes for granted,
“They go from calm to 100 knots so fast they seem enchanted.”
When the storm finally struck, it went off like a bomb. Barely 300 metres away, Maya and her team disappeared behind a wall of wind-driven rain. Gervais and I scrambled up the hill to the lighthouse and huddled in a tiny shack that offered little protection from the storm.
After about half an hour, the weather lifted a little. We ran back down to the shoreline but there was nothing but empty water.
“Where’d they go?” Gervais asked, his voice rising slightly.
I scanned the horizon. “Over there,” I shouted, pointing far to the west. The wind had driven the team farther out into the lake and well off course.
“I was crying because I felt so much for her,” Scoppa said, recalling the storm. “I knew she was going through so much agony.”
And then came the lightening — not far-off on the horizon, but right over head. That ended it. Vadillo pulled the plug. “I wasn’t really thinking. I just got out of the water and into the boat when they told me to,” Maya said. They were so close to shore, but it wasn’t her call. Throughout her swim, she never once asked to quit.
“It was disappointing, but it was the right decision. I didn’t want to be in the water when there was lightening,” she said.
Given the logistical challenge of organizing a lake crossing, there isn’t enough time left this summer for Maya to make another attempt. By next summer, she’ll be too old to try for the record.
Vadillo called me with the news. I called my editors, filed the story from my cellphone and used a sagging umbrella to shield my laptop as I edited the few photos I had. Around 9 p.m. the storm finally broke. I packed my gear and began the trek back to my car in the darkness.
Even with the heartbreaking end, Scoppa said he doesn’t see Maya’s swim as a failure.
“It was amazing to watch her out there,” he said. “I remember all the training that I watched her do. To see it actually happening for real, I was really immensely proud.