Why the ‘swimming professor’ is going the length of the Tennessee River
“Marty, is that the way?” said Andreas Fath pointing downriver just before he plunged into the Tennessee River on Thursday to begin a 652-mile swim.
Fath, a professor at Furtwangen University in Germany, plans to swim the Tennessee from its source at Forks of the River just east of downtown Knoxville to where it drains into the Ohio River near Paducah, Ky. He hopes to take just 31 days.
The scientist dubbed “the swimming professor” is promoting clean waterways while studying pollution along the Tennessee.“The reason I am doing this is to make people aware of their impact on the water,” he said.The start went well although he said later that he wasn’t joking about being unsure of which way to go.
“When you’re that close, it’s a little hard to tell which way the current is flowing,” he said. “I have a really good boat driver and he knows the way.”He swam roughly a mile before getting out at Ijams Nature Center’s river access for a press conference.Fath, 52, a competitive open-water swimmer, swam the 766-mile Rhine River in 2014 in a record 28 days.
“I’m interested to see how the two rivers compare in terms of pollution,” he said.A crew, including good friend and University of the South professor Martin Knoll, is accompanying Fath on a pontoon boat.
Fath hopes to average more than 20 miles a day swimming for about eight hours. He will have plenty of scientific analysis work to do when he gets out of the water each day.The team will be taking water samples the entire trip, trying to determine what pollutants are in the water. They use a piece of material about an inch in diameter to which chemicals will adhere. Fath will have one on his leg that he’ll change four times a day.
“In our library we have 600 different chemicals. In the Rhine will detected 128. We’ll see what’s in the Tennessee,” he said.Fath is most concerned about substances called micro-plastics that are produced when tossed plastic bottles and other items make their ways to the river and break down. “It all goes into the river eventually,” Fath said. These micro-plastics are eaten by fish and other wildlife, that in turn are eaten by humans.
“In 2050 if we don’t change our behavior on plastic waste we will have more plastic in the ocean than fish,” he said.Though his morning swim was short Wednesday, he already noticed several differences between the Rhine and the Tennessee. The temperature was close to freezing at times on his Rhine swim, while on Thursday he was sweating in his wet suit. The water was also not as choppy as on the Rhine.
“If you can see your hand on the upstroke that is a good thing,” he said, noting there were times on the choppy, foggy Rhine that he could not.
He will have to deal with nine reservoirs on the Tennessee where there will be no current to assist him. The Rhine had just one — Lake Constance.His big worry is protecting his skin. He suffered a cut on his neck when swimming the Rhine and it got infected.
“It is easy to get cut when you are swimming for eight hours a day,” he said. “Once the skin gets opened up it is really easy to get it infected; that is not good.”The Tennessee River trip took 2½ years of planning and the list of sponsors is a long one.
Fath hopes the swim will bring attention to goal of cleaning the world’s rivers.“We need to stop using plastic bags so much in stores and use alternatives,” he said. “We also need to recycle.”Fath will be joined periodically along the way by other swimmers who will tag along for short distances, but he’s the only one swimming the whole way.
He had joked when he got out of the water to hold the Ijams’ press conference that he, “was done for the day.”Instead, when the press event ended, he headed back out to the river channel in the pontoon boat, jumped back into the Tennessee, and was again on his way.
source:-https://www.usatoday.com/news/
