Northern Exposure: A Deep Sea Diver's Story

Why would a man (repeatedly) strip down to a Speedo and dive into the world's coldest waters? Because he can.

As looming icebergs blotted out the low sun, Lewis Gordon Pugh thrust his tiny craft into the Arctic pack ice 60 miles north of Norway. Spray kicked up by his paddles froze instantly against his wet suit, but the piercing chill didn't faze Pugh: Polar landscapes had been his proving ground before. In only a Speedo and a silicone cap, he had swum an entire kilometer among the great icebergs of the Antarctic and repeated the distance at the top of the world too.

And now, in the first week of September, the reigning king of extreme swimming was back, battling to achieve another kind of superhuman feat: to paddle 750 miles to the North Pole.

"Bear!" shouted a lookout on the small ship escorting his kayak. From 200 yards away, the huge predator gave the expedition a curious look and ambled away. Earlier, the paddler shared the ocean with two enormous fin whales. But no sign yet of a walrus, the one creature Pugh admitted he truly feared in the open water. Its long tusks could shred a plastic kayak to bits.

Hunched against the bitter wind, he paddled for four hours at a stretch. Unlike his swims, when an extra minute in the water could spell death, this journey had a different twist. In his heart, the 39-year-old former maritime lawyer from London hoped that he wouldn't make it to the finish. If he succeeded, it would mean that Arctic ice was disappearing even more rapidly than new reports suggested.

Polar exploits had fascinated Pugh since boyhood. Growing up in Devon, active but not athletic, he was spellbound by romantic stories of polar explorers told by his father, a naval admiral. The younger Pugh's hero was Captain Robert Falcon Scott, the British explorer who died after losing the race to the South Pole to Norwegian Roald Amundsen.

Tall and robust, with strong, chiseled good looks, Pugh always hoped that his destiny, too, would lie in polar regions. But he'd never dreamed he'd swim in them. Not until he was 17, in South Africa, where his family had gone to live, did Pugh get his first formal swim coaching. But training in a pool and slogging up and down blue-tiled lanes quickly bored him. Instead he made his bid for open water.

It was a big deal to swim the four and a half miles between Robben Island-home of the jail where Nelson Mandela was held captive—and Cape Town. Only 52 people had ever done it. Fiercely cold and trembling because he was such a skinny kid, Pugh became the 53rd. "When I got to dry land again, I felt I'd conquered the world," he recalls. "This was the way swimming was meant to be."

While in law school, he worked on helicopter rescue teams over Cape Town beaches and searched the atlas for bigger, harder swims. The desolate, rocky shore of Cape Agulhas, the southernmost point in Africa, passed under his arm. Norway's North Cape, the northernmost landmass in mainland Europe, did too. He was first to swim across Lake Malawi in Africa and 428th to swim from England to France, covering 22 miles in a respectable 14 hours 50 minutes.

Swimming around the Cape of Good Hope, he passed over the shadow of a great white shark. Sharks, crocodiles, hippos, walrus, and leopard seals were always a risk but never stopped Pugh from swimming. "I like looking over my shoulder and feeling a bit scared," he explains. "It makes me feel alive."

In 2006, living in London and working in a law firm specializing in shipping cases, Pugh swam from the open Pacific into Australia's Sydney Harbour; this made him the first person ever to do long-distance swims in all five of the world's oceans. At the World Winter Swimming Championships, staged in a "pool" cut in the sea ice at Oulu, Finland, Pugh goaded two Russian champions into a private race and won easily.

Yet somehow, at 36, Pugh felt like he was treading water. The explorer heroes he so admired had struggled against storms and hardships to discover new lands and add to the sum of human knowledge. What purpose, he asked himself, did his own swims serve? "I need to make them count for something," he told his friends.

His next long-haul swim was to be the entire length of the river Thames, which flows more than 200 miles through London to the sea. It was a friend-Clare Kerr, an ambassador for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)-who suggested that Pugh dedicate the swim to raising awareness of climate change. "Maybe even visit the prime minister on your way through London," she suggested.

For Pugh, something clicked. "It was like diving into the water and coming up into a whole new world," he says.

"I knew that this was what I had to do."

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