She’s taking home the mermaid crown.
A fearless Gotham native is set to stroke across the English Channel’s 21 miles of treacherous, shark-inhabited waters this week — becoming the first woman from the Big Apple to complete the coveted Triple Crown of open water swimming.
“I’ll cry. I’ve cried at the end of every swim, and it’s a happy cry. It’s not an ‘I’m exhausted cry.’ I’m very lucky,” said water wonder Fleur Sohtz, a 47-year-old chief marketing officer for a software-analytics firm.
“For those New Yorkers that are looking to do something a little crazy, they can,” said Sohtz — who already swam the Catalina Channel off California and around the island of Manhattan.
“It’s only crazy until someone does it. And I’m happy to be that New Yorker that’s going to do it,” the Upper East Side resident said.
Sohtz, originally of Brooklyn, will take her daring plunge Aug. 29 with a dedicated kayaker at her side to guide her through her laborious journey — which could easily climb to 26 miles because of strong currents.
That distance is comparable to a walk from Luna Park in Coney Island, Brooklyn, through Manhattan and to the New York Botanical Garden in The Bronx.
Sohtz estimates the trek could take between 12 and 16 hours, during which time she’s not allowed to as much as touch the kayak or even wear a wetsuit to battle the chilly, roughly 69-degree waters.
There also is always the possibility Sohtz will encounter sealife including sharks — which she experienced during her 6-hour channel night swim off the coast of San Francisco.
“He was friendly! He gave me a little bump and swam away. I didn’t realize it was the shark until afterwards,” Sohtz recalled.
“I popped up. I asked my crew on the boat if they threw a bottle at my head, and they said, ‘No, put your hand back in the water and keep swimming!’ And I realized what it was about a few strokes later — and I just kept swimming.”
The English Channel will mark Sohtz’s completion of what is considered the Triple Crown of open swimming: tackling the European waterway, the Catalina Channel and Manhattan — and make her the first female Big Apple native to nail all three.
Just 366 people from across the globe have earned the distinction. Fewer than half, or 150, were women.
For Sohtz, it’s almost kismet: Her birthday, though several decades later, falls on the same day fellow New Yorker Gertrude Caroline Ederle made history as the first woman to swim across the English Channel.
Water has always been in Sohtz’s blood. Born and raised in Manhattan Beach, Sohtz swam for Midwood High School, worked as a lifeguard at Jacob Riis Park and spent years of her childhood commuting to Staten Island for the opportunity to swim on a club team.
She took a brief break from the sport after spending four years competing at the Division 1 level at the University of Massachusetts but came back with a stronger appetite for much, much longer water adventures.
Sohtz kicked off her Triple Crown journey in 2021 when she swam the 28.5-mile circumference of Manhattan, which took 8.5 hours to complete. And no, she wasn’t turned off by any potential pollution.
“It was probably one of the greatest things I’ve done being from here — swimming under the Brooklyn Bridge, doing that backstroke, and everything that you get to see from the Empire State Building to the Chrysler Building … to seeing all my friends along the shore,” Sohtz said.
“I’m a big Yankees fan, and when we got to Yankee Stadium, looking at that from the water, I turned to my boat crew, and I said, ‘Play it!’ And they played Frank Sinatra’s ‘New York, New York.’ I started cheering in the water: ‘Let’s go, Yankees!’ and clapping — I thought they could secretly hear me. And then just kept swimming,” she said.
To take on the English Channel, Sohtz squeezes in an open water swim at Brighton Beach once a week but can mainly be found training with her team at the Asphalt Green sports facility on the Upper East Side.
The fitness center’s free learn-to-swim programs are the beneficiary of Sohtz’s record-breaking journey, for which she has raised more than $23,000 — a total she hopes to double by the time she hits the waves.
“I think a lot of people consider New Yorkers as people that don’t know how to drive, they don’t know how to swim, and they don’t know how to ride a bike,” the super swimmer said.
“I can do two of the three — driving is questionable — but I think if kids across the five boroughs see someone who grew up where they grew up doing something like this, it will create inspiration and excitement about what they can do.”
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