Jacques Tuset aka the “King of Prison Island Swimming” has safely “escaped” from former island prisons to the mainland on six continents to raise money and awareness of vision loss.
He swam from islands that have held famous prisoners, including Al Capone (Alcatraz) and Nelson Mandela (Robben Island)
Now just past sunrise on a calm and balmy August day he’s hoping to include four Boston Harbor islands to the 67 he has already completed.
Bald with a sturdy build, the 62-year-old Tuset looks like a French Mr. Clean. He wears a black-and-white striped swim cap with matching convict-like swimsuit. His two grown kids serve as his handlers, lathering him in Vaseline, suntan lotion, jellyfish repellent.
Look closely and he still has the tentacle marks where a jellyfish latched on to his neck and stung him severely near Marseille, France.
First up is the swim from Deer Island, where the prison housed inmates for more than a century until it was demolished in 1992. The mainland goal is 2.1 miles away at Point Shirley in Winthrop. Beforehand, Tuset acknowledges he is suffering from bad tendinitis in his shoulder.
“I’m OK,” he says.
For the International Marathon Swimming Hall of Famer, this 40-minute swim is like a quick dip in the pool. In South Africa, he once swam six hours without food because his support team let it spoil in the sun.
Today, he’s swimming with an escort vessel flying a dive flag and a caution sign to protect him from boat traffic. A Massachusetts Open-Water Simming Association official is also onboard to make sure he follows their strict rules including “no supporting contact with the swimmer whatsoever.”
Tuset, wearing earplugs, is a swimming machine, but one with calm, steady strokes, almost like a metronome.
Yet, when he veers off course, the calm is shattered by the loud screams and wild gestures of his kids, Lilou and William.
Rena Demeo, the open water swim official, seems almost to have a heart attack, because she thinks they’re screaming “SHAAAAARRRRK!” but they are actually yelling “JAAAACQUES!” in their thick French accents. They are gesturing to their dad to get back on course. It’s like a Steve Martin skit and laughter ripples across the water. Tuset easily finishes the first leg in under 40 minutes.
It turns out he already swam with sharks off Devil’s Island in French Guiana. “On that crossing, you can’t see a thing. The water is dark. And when we finished, the pilot told us that the seabed was teeming with many sharks,” he recounts. “He had a sonar to see deep down. But since there’s plenty for them to eat down there, they didn’t bother us. Luckily for us, the water was dark, because otherwise, I think we would’ve been scared out of our wits seeing them.”
He started his prison swims in 1999 after his friends had two children born with choroideremia, a rare genetic disease that causes blindness. It starts with night blindness and progresses into tunnel vision.
“When I saw what people with the disease experience — being in the darkness of a cell, looking out through a small window — I felt as if I were in a prison. And I thought to myself: ‘Are there any prison islands around the world that I could swim from to try to raise funds and bring attention to this disease?”'
The swims are soothing for the soul, he says.
He’s swum with whales, dolphins, and turtles.
“I was actually a long-distance swimmer,” says Tuset. “I swam across the English Channel, I swam across the Strait of Gibraltar, I swam around Manhattan,” he says.
Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay is one of his favorite swims.
He’s done that four times, once replicating the same conditions as an infamous escape on June 11, 1962.
“Sixty years later, under the same conditions, with the same currents and at the same time of night along the route,” he says.
He believes the prisoners did indeed survive.
He says Robben Island Prison, where Mandela was imprisoned for 18 years, was the most emotional swim. He admired the South African leader and the beauty of the swim toward Cape Town with its view of Table Mountain.
When he visited the now-closed prison, the tour guides, who are also former prisoners, told him, “When we saw you swimming, if we’d known we could escape, we would have learned to swim.”
In Boston, conditions are excellent. Low 80s, smooth surf, with a water temperature of 66 degrees. Asked if the water is clean, Tuset hesitates.
“So-so,” he says.
Next stop in Boston Harbor is the southern side of Georges Island to Hull High School. Confederate POW’s were housed at Fort Warren. It’s just 9/10ths of a mile but there is a strong current through Hull Gut.
Tuset aces the swim but grimaces as he puts on his soft bathrobe. His shoulder is getting worse but he shakes it off.
Then it’s off to Peddocks Island, where Italian POW’s were held during World War II. It’s just a half mile and 21 minutes for Tuset to stand on the rocky shoreline behind the Nut Island Fishing Pier in Quincy.
The final swim is from Long Island (Indigenous people were interned here during King Philip’s War in the 1670s,) 1.8 miles to Orchard Beach in the Squantum section of Quincy.
Tuset is supposed to start from the western rocks near the base of the demolished Long Island Bridge
But slinking around the boulders is a hungry-looking coyote, which necessitates moving the point of entry to be in knee high water.
Tuset swims right past the Boston police firing range on Moon Island, adding real-life sound effects to a prison escape theme.
He doesn’t stop but Tuset is in pain and veering off to his right.
“My shoulders were really hurting and by the end, I couldn’t turn anymore,” he says later.
There is also a sign. A monarch butterfly flutters briefly past the boat.
“Papillon!” says Lilou Tuset saying the French word for butterfly. It’s an instant reminder of the Steve McQueen movie and her dad’s swim from Devil’s Island.
It takes a full hour, but as Tuset steps on the beach, one beachgoer applauds, another toasts him.
“He’s just visiting,” yells John Forgione, the escort vessel captain.
Back on board, Tuset is all smiles, as he hydrates and dips into a family-sized bag of potato chips.
“I’m really happy. … It was brilliant. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The water was cool.”
“I learned lots,” he says in French. “(These islands) are steeped in history and full of emotion.”
Tendinitis or not, his goal is to keep swimming “forever.”
Quitting on that last leg was not an option, he says.
“The people I’m swimming for are hurting worse than me.”
Stan Grossfeld can be reached at stanley.grossfeld@globe.com.