“My mother warned us to be careful of the tide,” Gallant-Charette says, “but we weren’t listening.” As they filled their
baskets to the brim, nobody noticed the water rising — not until it was too late. Cut off from the beach, they
abandoned their gear and catch and started to swim. “It wasn’t that far out,” she recalls. “But all of a sudden, one of
my brothers screamed, ‘Shark!’ And I could tell by the tone of his voice that he wasn’t kidding.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a dark shape skim the surface. “I panicked,” she says. Her arms and legs
wouldn’t go. She was barely treading water. Something brushed her leg. “I thought I was going to die right there,” she
says. But then a seal, not a shark, poked its head up. Gallant-Charette managed to gather herself and get to shore.

“I remember lying there on my back, in the sand, cussing up a storm,” she says. “We’ve had plenty of laughs about it
since, but that put a real fear in me, and it stayed with me.”

One night in 2017, more than 50 years later, Gallant-Charette found herself in the middle of a 26-mile expanse of
deep water between Hawaii’s Oahu and Molokai islands. The sky was black, the water was black, and she’d been
swimming for about eight hours. From a boat, her brother David watched the green beacon on her back blinking off
and on, tracing her progress through the dark.

Suddenly, around 2 a.m., she started yelling. Something had knocked into her legs. The boat crew snapped on a
spotlight and scanned the surface. Gallant-Charette treaded water. If she so much as touched the boat, her swim, the
sixth leg of a challenge called the Oceans Seven, would be disqualified. She thought about a friend, stalked by a tiger
shark in these same waters, who’d recently had to quit a swim several hours in.