Marathon swimmer says he quit Lake Michigan after going in wrong direction with dead GPS

A swimmer said two lost batteries ruined his attempt to cross Lake Michigan on the third day of the extraordinary journey.

Jim Dreyer, 60, was taken out of the water last thursday after 60 miles (96 kilometers). He said he swam for hours from Michigan to Wisconsin without a working GPS device.

A support boat arrived and informed him he had been swimming north all day — “the wrong direction,” said Dreyer, who left Grand Haven on Tuesday.

“What a blow!” he said in a report which he posted online. “I should have been on the home stretch, deep into Wisconsin waters with about 23 miles to go. Instead, I had 47 miles to go, and the weather window was closing fast.”

Dreyer said his “brain was like mush” and he had hallucinations about freighters and a steel wall. He thought it would take him a few more days to reach Milwaukee, but there was a forecast of 9-foot (2.7-meter) waves.

“We all knew that success was now a long way off and that if I continued, I would probably need a rescue,” Dreyer said.

Dreyer, whose nickname is The Shark, crossed Lake Michigan in 1998, starting in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, and ending in Ludington, Michigan. But three attempts to do it again since last summer have failed.

Dreyer was towing an inflatable boat last week with food and supplies. On the second day, he stopped to get new AA batteries to keep a GPS unit working. But in the process, he somehow lost the bag in the lake, he said.

He now had only a wrist compass and the air and waves to help him keep moving west.

“It was an accident, but it was my fault,” Dreyer said of the lost batteries. “This is a bitter pill to swallow.”

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