This past Sunday, Kari Kastango, who lives with her wife in South Hadley, Massachusetts, became the first known person to swim all 410 miles of the Connecticut River, all the way down to the Long Island Sound. It took the Bay State native four years to cover all 2,164,800 feet, planning around sewage overflow releases and once in 47-degree water, according to MassLive.com.
Reports MassLive.com:
Swimming the Connecticut River wasn’t a feat Kastango, 56, had set out to do. She has loved the sport since she was about 10, but never swam competitively.
Kastango mostly grew up in the Massachusetts town of Holland and swam with her siblings at the reservoir there. She later graduated from the University of Massachusetts and received her doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh, and she now works as a director of statistical operations, analyzing data for medical research.
When she and her wife Alison Garvey moved to South Hadley a few years ago, Kastango couldn’t find a pond as she had in other Massachusetts towns where she lived. So she swam at the YMCA in Holyoke.
“I got tired of doing flip turns and a friend brought me to the Connecticut River to swim,” she said.
Kastango took her first swim in the river from Elwell Island in Northampton and to this day it continues to be one of her favorite parts of the river. Eventually, she wanted to try out other parts of the waterway.
Her desire to try other spots to swim led her to think she should just cover the entire river.
“At first I thought it was 200 miles. When I researched it I said, ‘Twice the size, twice the adventure,” Kastango said.
But many friends, family and others who gathered to celebrate her finish said her accomplishment is far more than an athletic feat.
Her finish highlights the change in the Connecticut River and the importance of the hundreds of millions of dollars of work communities up and down the river, including Holyoke, Chicopee and Springfield, have done to lessen sewage overflows and reduce pollution in the watershed, said Rebecca Todd, executive director of the Connecticut River Conservancy.
Read the complete MassLive.com story here.
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