Clint Eastwood actually is a bad-ass in real life
by Mark Lukach
Clint Eastwood has been playing bad-asses in movies for his entire acting career, but I had no idea that he was a bad-ass in real life, too.
My friend Chris tipped me off to a pretty incredible story about Eastwood from when he was only 21 years old: the guy survived a plane crash at sea and swam a few miles to shore off the coast of Point Reyes, California, in freezing cold water that is a major breeding ground for great white sharks.
Are you feeling lucky, Clint?
Eastwood was stationed at Fort Ord as a lifeguard in 1951, and hopped on a Douglas AD-1 military aircraft for a ride from Seattle to Sacramento. An AD-1 is a two-seater, so it was just Eastwood and the plane’s pilot, Anderson.
The most in-depth telling of the story is in the book Clint Eastwood: A Biography by author Richard Schickel. Because the book is only partially available on Google Books, I can’t find many details about the captain, or the circumstances that precipitated the plane going down.
It was some type of technical malfunction that caused the pilot to perform a crash landing at sea, a few miles off the coast of Point Reyes. It was October, and the water in Northern California in October is quite cold, usually in the mid-50s. Anderson and Eastwood climbed out onto the wing of the plane, but it was clearing going to sink. With the plane going down, the pair jumped off and started swimming towards the shoreline, with the current pulling them north. They promised to try to stay together.
Here are a few excerpts from Eastwood himself from the biography:
And then it started getting dark, and I lost him. I didn’t know whether he was alive or where the hell he was. And I wasn’t about to start yelling, because it wastes a lot of energy. I went through jellyfish schools and all kinds of things, and they became fluorescent at night. It was like some science-fiction deal. By this time, you know, your mind is–talking about hallucinating…
Eastwood swam through a kelp bed, where the phosphorous was glowing brightly, which allowed him to see the shoreline, and the whitewater of crashing waves. He spotted an area where it didn’t appear to be too rocky.
I kind of worked my way into that–just partly luck, because everywhere the water was very rough. And I got into this spot and had a really rough time climbing out.
He made it to the beach, and kept hallucinating that he saw Anderson in the water behind him. A few times he rushed back into the water to grab rocks that he thought was the other survivor.
He climbed out of the cove and saw in the distance a bright light. He walked towards it, barefoot and freezing cold, went across a lagoon, jumped a fence, and got to a building owned by RCA that transmitted radiograms.
He was picked up and brought to the Coast Guard station up further, where he reunited with Anderson, who had also survived.
The San Francisco Chronicle ran the story with the headline “Swimming Teacher Paddled 2 Miles After Plane Crash.”
That’s pretty remarkable. October can see some fairly sizeable swells, and Point Reyes is a large landmass that typically takes a large brunt of any and all swells. It’s hard to gauge from the account exactly where he came to shore, but there’s no question in my mind that many people would not have survived that swim. Clint was a confident swimmer, a lifeguard and a swim instructor at a military base. A less confident swimmer probably would not have made it that far, in the dark and the cold, alone.
*book sources Clint Eastwood: A Biography, Clint: The Life and Legend. Image from picgifs.com. Thanks to Chris Mulchay for the tip.
The RCA building is still there and is just outside the town of Bolinas so he would have been on the sheltered southern side of the Point Reyes peninsula, but it can still get rough there.
The RCA facility was radio station KPH. The station buildings are still there. It was still operational until late ’90′s when the Callsign (none of the infrastructure) was taken over by what is now GlobeWireless.
Historic RCA Building at Point Reyes ::: https://maps.google.com/maps?ll=38.092941,-122.944844&spn=0.009018,0.018561&radius=15000&t=h&z=16&vpsrc=6&layer=c&cbll=38.092941,-122.944844&cbp=12,0,,0,0&photoid=po-32190500
Abbotts Lagoon is just to the north.
The story, which I’ve heard before, had ZERO to do with catchy headline. Thanks so much building me up and letting me down.
This area is a hotbed of White Shark activity, however I have always understood that we know very little about their breeding activities.
yep, nothing badass about that story paul.
hahahaha! thank you
From what I understand, great whites are in tropical waters b/c they are cold-blooded. So while they may be in the general area, they would not be there while the water was freezing. I am no expert however.
Joe,
Great whites are capable of internal regulation of their body temperature (see Wikipedia article here) so they’re not necessarily cold-blooded. Also, that area of the world, from Ano Nuevo Island, out to the Farallons, and up to Point Reyes, is known as the Red Triangle for the high number of Great White Shark attacks in that region. Finally, the ocean water doesn’t freeze in that area, besides which these animals can handle pretty cold water temperatures. For instance, the coastal water temps in that area range from 40-50 F year round, nowhere near enough to keep Great Whites away. Mr. Eastwood was pretty lucky not to 1) drown, or 2) bump into Jaws on his way back to land. In my book, that counts as being a bad-ass!
Joe, that is false. First of all, great white sharks are *partially* warm blooded (they can raise their body temp higher than ambient water temperature). Second of all, that area of northern california is teeming with sharks.
Point Reyes is out where you catch cold ocean currents in already-cold Northern California parts of the Pacific Ocean, and if you don’t have a wetsuit, you’re at risk from hypothermia even if you don’t get lost in the dark and fog. Sure, killing a shark with your teeth sounds more badass, but it’s still a seriously dangerous swim.
Eddie would go.
And yeah, they do get big sharks there, though more of them are offshore than nearby. Lots of nutrients in the cold water, lots of fish, lots of seals that eat the fish, tasty shark food, and swimmers in wetsuits look a lot like seals.
[...] You want a real Hollywood badass? Try Clint Eastwood on for size. Read about how, when he was only 21, Clint braved shark-infested waters to survive a plane crash. (The Scuttlefish) [...]
They were a long way from Sacramento, 100 miles west
Writer Dennis Murphy (“The Sergeant”) claimed he punched Eastwood one night in a Monterey bar around that time and Clint cleaned his clock for him. Murphy was a big brawling guy notorious for starting fights. See footnote to “Dennis Murphy Likes To Hit People.”