EDITOR’S NOTE: Call to Earth is a NCS editorial sequence dedicated to reporting on the environmental challenges dealing with our planet, along with the options. Rolex’s Perpetual Planet Initiative has partnered with NCS to drive consciousness and training round key sustainability points and to encourage optimistic motion.
The water was calm that morning in the Okavango Delta, in Botswana. Belgian diver Alain Brandeleer remembers the visibility was good and that he felt no specific unease. He had spent a lot of his life searching for ever extra excessive experiences in the water, swimming with sharks in several components of the world — even with nice whites, and not using a cage. Over time, the fixed publicity to danger had stopped giving him an adrenaline rush. And when that occurs, he stated, a query seems that’s onerous to ignore: what comes subsequent?
That day, September 6, 2012, the reply was brutal. The water turned cloudy and thick. Visibility disappeared in a matter of seconds. He felt one thing brush in opposition to his legs, however didn’t absolutely register what it was at first. Then he understood. The physique of a crocodile was wrapped round him, and it was biting his proper arm.
One of his companions managed to maintain him by the oxygen tank for greater than a minute. Brandeleer would later say that saved his life.
“If he had let go for a second, I was dead,” he stated.
After the assault got here the wait. Hours handed earlier than medics may attend to him, get him onto a helicopter and switch him to a hospital in Johannesburg. During that point he didn’t even know for sure whether or not he nonetheless had his arm.
“I could feel the arm, but I didn’t know if it was there or not,” he recalled. The wetsuit was holding it in place.
When the docs assessed Brandeleer they determined the arm had to be amputated.
It was a devastating blow. Brandeleer was born with an atrophy of his left hand. From a younger age he had realized to reside with that bodily distinction and to resist it defining him. The arm that had simply been destroyed was his only absolutely functional one.
Over the years, water grew to become the place the place he may show himself. First as a diver, then as a long-distance swimmer, he present in the sea a type of freedom. In the water he managed to push his personal limits and notice that, in his case, these limits had been typically extra psychological than bodily.
That’s why, when the docs raised the choice of amputation, his response was fast. He remembers telling the physician, with a relaxed that also surprises him immediately, that if that was the only choice, he would somewhat not get up from the anaesthesia.
Along with his high quality of life, he was involved about turning into a burden. For years he had supported his father — emotionally and financially — at a time when his well being had deteriorated badly. That expertise left a mark on him. “I promised myself I would never put my son in that situation,” he defined.
Trying to save the arm carried a really excessive chance of dying by an infection however confronted with Brandeleer’s stubbornness, surgeons determined to strive.
He survived, however his restoration was not easy. There had been surgical procedures, issues and infections that examined his bodily and psychological resilience.
But six months after the assault, he went again into the water.
He began with fundamental, virtually exploratory actions, accompanied by a physiotherapist, as a part of his rehabilitation. More than a sporting purpose, it was a manner of recovering a relationship with his personal physique.
Over time, he started to practice a number of occasions a day. He adjusted actions. He tried, obtained annoyed, then tried once more. Then, he informed his physiotherapist he wished to swim the English Channel. He didn’t do it, however the thought marked a shift. A 12 months later, after a number of setbacks — together with one other harm and an an infection — he set a purpose to swim the Strait of Gibraltar.
He crossed the 8-mile passage in 2015, three years after the assault.
He didn’t cease there, swimming between Corsica and Sardinia in 2023. Each swim, he stated, was a manner to come to phrases with what had occurred to him.
In parallel, the sea started to occupy one other place in his life. On his journeys by way of the Red Sea, the Mediterranean and different distant spots, Brandeleer started to discover that even in locations that appeared pristine at first, plastic waste piled up on seashores, floated in the water and blended with the wildlife.
“You arrive at a place that looks like paradise, you walk a few meters, and it’s full of plastic,” he stated.
The picture of turtles mistaking baggage for jellyfish stayed with him. So did the distinction between dive websites he had identified a long time earlier, stuffed with shade and life, and their present state, degraded and polluted. That change shook him. It satisfied him that these wonders could possibly be misplaced in a single technology.
It was Brandeleer’s son who informed him about The Ocean Cleanup, a corporation that intercepts plastic earlier than it reaches the ocean.
He determined to begin with one thing easy: swimming to increase funds.
In 2025, Brandeleer swam between the Spanish islands of Ibiza and Formentera, a journey of about 23 kilometers in open water. The initiative raised round 24,000 euros ($28,000) — roughly the value of intercepting 500,000 plastic bottles earlier than they reached the ocean. Beyond the determine, what him was the concept that one individual’s small motion may have a measurable affect.
Brandeleer wished to encourage others and present the prospects of collective motion.
His “Running for the Ocean” initiative takes the identical thought to dry land. It’s a 20-kilometer (12.4 mile) race in Brussels, with greater than 250 individuals elevating funds to assist intercept 1 million plastic bottles. It’s not about efficiency, however about participation — and, above all, replicability. The intention is for the mannequin to be transferable to different cities and develop internationally.
Today, greater than a decade after the assault, the ache continues to be there. Not always, however sufficient to remind Brandeleer that his physique won’t ever be the identical. For some time, he tried to resist it, keep away from it, ignore it. With time, he modified the manner he associated to the sensation.
“If you see it as an enemy, it always wins,” he stated.
He prefers to consider it as a part of his life, one thing he coexists with. In the identical manner he lives with the reminiscence of the accident, with the story of getting been born with an atrophied hand, and with the certainty that a lot of his character was shaped round that distinction.
When he talks about every part that got here afterwards, he doesn’t body it as a comeback story. There is not any clear second when every part will get higher. Rather, he describes a sequence of transformations — some sought, others not — that step by step gave form to one thing completely different. He talks about his father. About his son. About the youngsters born with bodily variations whom he additionally needs to attain when he swims. “I want to show them that with passion and perseverance, you can achieve the unthinkable,” he stated.
Thirteen years in the past, in the murky waters of Botswana, Alain Brandeleer misplaced management of his physique inside the jaws of a crocodile.
Today, when he goes into the sea, it’s completely different. His motion is extra aware, extra measured. There is not any want to strive something. What there may be, as an alternative, is a special manner of being there: the conviction that even a life marked from delivery by distinction, formed by ache and worry, can nonetheless push for one thing bigger than itself.