North Saanich woman dances with the sea
The only sea creature Renate Herberger hasn’t come face to face with is the Cadborosaurus. Dressed in her wet suit, fins, mask and snorkel, she may have been mistaken for the mythical creature — perhaps on a jaunt to the Peninsula — while swimming in Deep Cove.
Swimming has always been a means of personal liberation for Herberger, though she only realized it recently.
“I started swimming at the age of four, my mom taught me,” Herberger said. As a teen she would sneak out of the house, down to the local quarry — deemed both haunted and a hazard — and swim.
“For some reason that place made me feel an inner peace,” Herberger said. She felt an “at homeness” in the water and “never perceived a sense of danger from the ocean.”
So it was fitting that, after a health issue two years ago, her body is only at ease in the sea.
Two years ago, during a trip abroad, she tore cartilage in one of her knees. Upon her return to Canada the situation worsened as she found herself waiting weeks for surgery.
“I felt like I was in a torture chamber in my body,” Herberger said. She felt betrayed by the system and her doctors, and even her body rebelled. During the wait she got thrombosis in her leg — “it never resolved.” Thrombosis is the formation of a clot or thrombus inside a blood vessel, obstructing the flow of blood through the circulatory system.
“It’s like taking the Pat Bay Highway and Highway 1 and shutting them down, leaving only the back roads,” she explained. “It means a traffic jam.”
But without the thrombosis, she wouldn’t know of her connection to the sea.
“It has opened another door for me at sea,” Herberger said.
Now she feels a connection with the sharks; there are some subspecies which must remain in constant motion to oxygenate.
“If I’m in constant motion I’m okay,” she said. “There’s no cure, there’s no medicine. There are pain killers, which so far I’m not taking.”
Swimming, she feels, is a 100 per cent effective therapy.
“I’m a dance therapist and I’ve worked with dance all my life. Now the sea is my dance therapist,” Herberger said. “It’s my therapy, my doctor, my shaman, my muse, my lover.”
She feels like a “modern mermaid.”
“I actually hear the symphony of the sea and the humpbacks singing,” Herberger said. “I’m part of that orchestra.”
But even her muse couldn’t conjure up the dream that became a reality earlier this year.
As a personal challenge, she swam 16 kilometres (for nine hours), traversing the sea across the Golfo Dulce on Costa Rica’s Pacific Coast.
The swim came about after she spent the last couple of years in Mexico, swimming away the pain and the winter cold. Last May she signed up for a 10-kilometre swim that was cancelled, so she discovered a seven kilometer swim in Costa Rica and packed up for a month-long campout there. She finished second in her age category.
Herberger was invited to stay and teach and one day found herself looking across the gulf saying “I want to do that.”
Two days later she did the swim that she called, “the best nine hours of my life.”
Over the 16 kilometres she swam with dolphins and even encountered one shark; plus, the local media came along for the ride.
“I could honestly say to them, that I’d never felt more energized in my life,” Herberger said. “I could have stepped back in the water and swum back and it would have cost me nothing in energy.”
The media told the tale of a disabled woman taking on the ocean as a personal challenge. “I have a weird disability, but I’m not disabled,” Herberger said.
“There was a part of me that wanted to do this again,” she added. “I started thinking in bigger terms.”
She decided it would be an opportunity to swim for a cause. She has a few Costa Rica awareness organizations on board — including shark finning, where sharks have their fins sliced off and are thrown back into the ocean — but has been cautioned by locals there not to commit to one cause.
“It’s a universal appeal to respect all our ecosystems,” Herberger said. “While I’m permitted to swim safely there’s something I need to give back.”
She plans to swim, starting Feb. 1, up the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica — from Bahia Salinas to Punta Burica.
“The entire project is volunteer run, and not-for-profit, no one is paid, I even fly there on my own dime,” she said. “We now have an Israeli documentary filmmaker who is volunteering to spend two months on the project, but we have to find funds to fly him there.”
The filmmaker, Joshua Faudem, “simply can not afford the plane ticket,” Herberger said. “[It’s] amazing enough that he is willing to give two full months of his life for this project. He really believes in it, and feels it would make an incredible movie.”
She’s alloted three months for the swim; if it doesn’t come to fruition, she intends return the following spring to complete the task. For more information or to sponsor Herberger call 656-1312 or email renate_herberger@yahoo.com.
reporter@peninsulanewsreview.com
