Polar-Plunged Marine
Headed To Afghanistan

Last-year winner Michael Howard predicted he would prevail in the 11th annual New Haven Polar Plunge. However, Howard met his match in Alfred Hunt, a young Marine scheduled to fly off to Afghanistan later this month.

After 15 minutes in the icy waters off Lighthouse Point, neither young man would consent to come out.

It took nothing less than the Greek god of the seas Poseidon, disguised as the event’s chief organizer Chris Randall, to lure the two game competitors into agreeing to a tie and heading for the 80 degree hot tubs.

Howard and Hunt were among more than 100 daring plungers participating in the annual First Day New Haven Winter Festival at Lighthouse Park on Saturday morning.

It was not only the unseasonably warm 45 degree weather but a new sponsorship that accounted for the estimate record turnout .

For the first time, the New Haven Land Trust, of which Randall is the executive director, cosponsored the event with Elm City Park Conservancy, which had served as sole sponsor the previous 10 years.

The event cost $20 for breakfast and a plunge. Randall reported that 120 plungers plunged and another 200 watched them. Seven community gardens and five park friends groups fielded plungers. In all $4,500 was raised. 

A long line of people with bizarre ideas of how to spend New Year’s morning began to queue up at the carousel pavilion.

The Green Man, aka known as Patrick Quinn, a computer salesman from New Haven, was among them. He said he wore green because he was angry he had not met any women during his New Year’s Eve partying the previous night.

“It’s not going to be easy meeting them this way either,” he acknowledged. But his good friend Poseidon had recruited him to plunge. So here he was.

Meanwhile Michael Howard sat in a sunlit corner of the pavilion expressing quiet confidence as he ate his breakfast of scrambled eggs, sausage, and blueberry muffin.

“I’m predicting I’ll win this year. I’m [a little] timid because the water is a little warmer,” he said, estimating it at 35 degrees. That and the warm air might also bring out unforeseen competitors.

Howard had not yet met Hunt.

Before the adults plunged, about 25 brave kids showed the way. Crying ​“I can’t feel my legs!” Alex Eklund (shirtless in above photo) refused to leave before his be-caped brother Anthony did.

When Chris Randall promised them both a stuffed polar bear as a prize, they finally raced out together, with Anthony saying afterwards the best part was the hot tub.

Then the adult plungers lined up at the water’s edge ready to do the icy deed.

But Poseidon’s trident was nowhere to be seen in the crowd. The god was off checking on the eggs perhaps. Five minutes passed. Then ten. Goosebumps the size of golf balls began to appear on exposed shoulders and legs.

Where’s Poseidon? the plungers mumbled as they jockeyed closer to the water in the spirit of first in, first out.

The god, having found his flip flops, finally appeared. A red and white ambulance parked beside the pavilion edged a little closer to the sand. And the countdown began.

Splashing into the water went the winter bathers.

Of the 100 who entered, more than half went up to shins or knees, then splashed and left within the time it takes for a camera shutter to open and close. Poseidon would not criticize. However he offered that you had to be at least up to the armpits and preferably fully immersed to count as a plunge.

Howard and Hunt and a cohort of a half dozen others were redefining plunge as they actually seemed to be enjoying themselves.

After 12 minutes, only Hunt and Howard were left.

Poseidon himself reappeared from the waves, duly wet up to his white beard but having lost a flip flop again.

Turning to the stalwart bathers who remained, he argued he could not get on with his other duties until the guys emerged. Neither would budge.

Lisa Eklund, the mother of the boy winners Alex and Anthony, yelled out to Hunt, ​“Come out!”

“Negative,” came Hunt’s answer with hardly a quaver in his voice.

It turned out that the boys were Hunt’s young brothers-in-law. Braving the cold clearly runs in this family.

“Al is deploying to Afghanistan in January,” said Lisa Eklund. ​“We had to get him in [to the plunge this year, his first time] and pray for his safe return.”

Hunt is a mortar man with the third battalion second marines out of Camp Lejeune. He recently returned from extreme weather pre-deployment training in the Mojave Desert in California.

He was the competition that Michael Howard was not looking forward to, and then some.

If he was nervous, Howard wasn’t showing it. In sunglasses, he appeared to be rather lolling about, enjoying himself treading water quite near Hunt, about 25 feet from the shoreline.

Finally, using his finely honed divine negotiating skills, Poseidon urged on both men a compromise: come out together. So they did, arm in arm.

“I’m fighting for [people being able to do] stuff like this,” said Hunt, a 22 year-old and graduate of the Sound School, as he gamely consented to stand for an interview on the beach. ​“The Marines taught us perseverance. If I come out, it defeats the training.”

“I figure he’s fighting for this country, a nice guy to tie with,” Howard added.

Then they both headed for the hot tubs.