A 56-year-old mother claims to have become the first woman to swim the Atlantic after an epic 24-day crossing in a shark cage.

Jennifer Figge, from Aspen, Colorado, says she set off from the Cape Verde Islands on January 12, facing waves of up to 30 feet.

She had originally planned to swim to the Bahamas, but landed on a beach at an abandoned leper colony on Trinidad’s Chacachacare Island on Thursday after being blown 1000 miles off course.

During the crossing, she saw a pod of pilot whales, several turtles, dozens of dolphins, plenty of Portuguese men-of-war - but no sharks.

“I was never scared,” she said. “Looking back, I wouldn’t have it any other way. I can always swim in a pool.” Ms Figge’s crossing comes a decade after a Frenchman, Benoit Lecomte, made the first solo trans-Atlantic swim in 73 days.

She said she had been planning the attempt ever since a stormy trans-Atlantic flight to Italy with her mother - a professional opera singer - when she was 11.

“I told my mother, ’I hope that lightning hits the plane and we get to go down in the middle of the Atlantic and get into those cool life vests and swim the rest of the way,’” she explained before setting off.

Ms Figge’s son, Alex, now a racing car driver, inspired his mother to take up endurance sports when he asked her to stop smoking for his seventh birthday. She decided she needed to replace her cigarette addiction with another habit.

Ms Figge swam in a red cap and wet suit in a shark cage attached to a cataraman fittingly named “Carried Away.” “I’ve always dreamed about being this little thing in the big ocean,” she explained before her departure. “The cage is my playpen. It’s like a big french fry basket.” She woke around 7 am and stocked up on pasta and baked potatoes before spending up to eight hours in the water each day.

While she was swimming, crew members would throw bottles of energy drinks to her or, if the seas were too rough, a diver would deliver them in person.

At night, she returned to the boat to gorge on meat, fish and peanet butter to replenish the estimated 8000 calories she burned each day.

Aboard, she kept a prized photograph of Gertrude Ederle, the American who became the first woman to swim the English Channel in 1926.

“We have a few things in common,” Figge said. “She wore a red hat and she was of German descent.

We both talk to the sea, and neither one of us wanted to get out.” Ms Figge plans to continue her voyage today by swimming from Trinidad to the British Virgin Islands, aiming to arrive in late February.

While in Trinidad at the weekend, she avoided the hotel pool and the nearby sea and worked out instead on the treadmill. ENDS

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