Author Maggie Jackson and Her Team the Elephant Rock Sea Bears

When the COVID epidemic struck and many of us were forced to stay home, mask up, and social distance, isolation became widespread. New friendships were hard to come by.

Maggie Jackson, an acclaimed non-fiction writer who hunkered down in her home in Little Compton during those trying times, was the exception. When she and her husband John Hitchcock took to the ocean to begin swimming year-round off Elephant Rock Beach in Westport, they made many new friends.

People would walk by with their dogs and say hello. Pretty soon some were regularly joining them in the water. When Stephen Bird saw John and Maggie swimming one cold winter day, he said to his wife, “Those must be crazy people. They’re our kind of people.” Before long, he was joining them. By 2021, the Elephant Rock Sea Bears was born.

Early on, Beth McCurdy became a mainstay. John and Maggie’s neighbor, George Maxted, later joined. Maggie’s childhood friend, Mike Duffy of Lexington, Mass. comes over often to enjoy an ocean swim. 

The Sea Bears come from all walks of life, but are bonded by their dawn swims, sometimes with other local swim groups. Some, like Maggie and John, swim almost every day; others, less frequently. They are at all levels of swimming. “It’s very loose, but it works,” she adds.

So when she was encouraged to do the Buzzards Bay Swim last year, she invited the Sea Bears to take on the swim with her. Maggie, John, George, Stephen and Mike completed the 2025 swim, with the help of kayak escorts Anna Hitchcock and Jane Kalinski. This year, veteran Bay swimmer Phil Weinstein will also join them.

While she has been swimming all of her life, Maggie was more of a runner for decades. Committing to a long-distance swim was a little out of the ordinary for her.

She was so impressed with the work the Coalition does on land and sea that she was willing to give it a try. She admits she is not a fast swimmer, “but I am doing something I love and challenging myself.”

Maggie is an expert in uncertainty. She wrote a book about the wisdom of being skillfully unsure. Swimming, especially the Buzzards Bay Swim, is like “a venture into the unknown. You don’t know what the ocean is going to give you. But working at the edge of what you know is exciting and strengthening.”

What she is certain of is the fulfilment the event gives her and her team. “Open-water swimming is a joy and an adventure, and to do it for the Earth and the oceans is best of all,” says Maggie.