Strait of Bonifacio
- 11.9 km
- Distance
- Corsica ↔ Sardinia
The 1959 race
The oldest swimming crossing of the Strait of Bonifacio for which we have evidence is a race. The newsreel La Settimana Incom of August 6, 1959, shows the «aquatic marathon from Corsica to Sardinia»: spectators and swimmers on the pier in Bonifacio, a man lowering the starting flag from a boat, a swimmer diving in, and the Roman brothers Ruggero and Paolo Ciacci in the lead. Ruggero wins, beating his brother by three seconds (Archivio Luce). Among the starters were also the Hungarian Magda Molnar and the Egyptian Sayed Gelin, who, according to those who later recounted the race, was in the lead but on the wrong trajectory. The finish line was in Sardinia, at Santa Teresa Gallura.
We know the date of the newsreel, August 6, 1959; we do not know the date of the race itself. In Gallura, the two brothers are still remembered as the first to cross the Strait, at least from the Italian side. Before them, we have found no documented crossings, and the 1959 event remained the only edition of the race in the 20th century.
Today's crossings
For decades, the crossing remained almost without a history. A swimmer who was preparing for it recounted having looked for those who had already done it and finding information that was «scarce, unreliable, and undocumented». Things changed when the Diving Mediterraneo center in Santa Teresa Gallura began assisting swimmers and recording every crossing on a log sheet, with times, miles, currents, and wind.
The stories come from those logs. On October 23, 2013, three Londoners went from Punta Sperone to Porto Quadro in 4 hours and 20 minutes, and the log calls it a «new record». On September 4, 2014, six swimmers started together from Punta Sperone: two arrived at Porto Quadro, while three were pushed by the easterly current as far as Capo Testa. Andrea Sechi, from Santu Lussurgiu, crossed at age 71 in 4 and a half hours. On September 14, 2019, Gaia Naldini went from Punta Sperone to Rena Bianca in 3 hours and 37 minutes.
On July 5, 2017, Daniel Douglas Di Pierro made the first round-trip crossing: he started from Rena Bianca at 7:38, touched Punta Sperone at 12:10, and returned to Rena Bianca at 17:10, without a wetsuit, 16.8 nautical miles in 9 hours and 32 minutes. On June 1, 2022, Helen Betley went from Sardinia to Corsica entirely using the butterfly stroke, in almost seven hours. On a Sunday, September 26, six swimmers from Bologna completed the first relay crossing, from Corsica to Rena Bianca.
The times
The register does not have an official ranking: «record» appears only in the text of a few log sheets. The rankings on this page list the recorded crossings, separating wetsuit from swimsuit; the two directions can be selected with a filter, because starting from Corsica or from Sardinia is not the same crossing. The timeline below shows how the best time has been lowered.
Timeline
Computed from the recorded crossings: the first, the first by sex, the first from each country and every record broken.