William’s aquatic achievements are largely limited to his early teen and preteen years. His swimming career, arguably, peaked at the tender age of fifteen when he completed an open water mile in approximately 24 minutes at the friendly Camp Longhorn confines of Inks Lake in the Texas Hill Country to finish fifth in the boys camp. Prior to this Weismullerian meteoric rise, he demonstrated moments of brilliance. His adept swimming skills manifested themselves prenatally when the highly-motile and flagellate-propelled haploid gamete of his father - John J. Dailey, Jr. - departed ‘home’ with potentially some half-million other brethren in search of the more sedentary lifestyle related to consummation and fertilization. Prenatal development was not unlike any other chordate, time in the womb included pharyngeal gill pouches and postanal tail where seemingly life, or prelife, went swimmingly.
To no one’s surprise, he was born to a livebearer under a bad moon rising and the sign of Aquarius - the waterboy. As tot and post-tot, he was highly skilled at dynamic apnea – underwater swimming for distance. The precise motivation for this underwater behavior is not known but might be related to the numerous sirens in his life – a darling mother, three conspiring, but not necessarily wicked, sisters and an endearing domestic. Avie Lee, the endearing domestic, had a cheetah-like lightening quickness in the terrestrial environment. William recognized his webfeet provided a tremendous competitive advantage, and peaceful refugia, in the lakes and sloughs of Louisiana over the fleet-footed, but terra-bound, Ms. Clark. The mere mention of water snakes seemed to tone down Ms. Clark’s enthusiasm for fetching the young tadpole from his niche in freshwater ecosystems.
William rediscovered the appeal of open water swimming while under contract to the Environmental Protection Agency in Nevada. He just happened to be in Truckee, CA for the annual 2.7 mile Donner Lake Swim in 2004. He has since completed more than 90 open water swims across the continental United States including the one-mile Chesapeake Bay Swim (Maryland), the Alcatraz Sharkfest Swim (California), the Big Shoulders 5K (Illinois), the Wingshadow Horsetooth 10K (Colorado), the Minnetonka 5-mile Challenge (Minnesota), the Low Country Splash (South Carolina), the Long Bridge Swim (Idaho), the Governor’s Island Swim (New York), Chattanooga River Rat 1.2-mile Swim (Tennessee), Capital 2K (Texas) and the Pennock Island 8-mile Challenge (Alaska). Current goals include one century of official open water race events, i.e. one hundred swims, and completion of the Manhattan Island Marathon Swim in New York City, New York. He visualizes himself a yellowfin tuna or wahoo while swimming but morphometrics call to mind the lazy mechanics of the North American bullfrog, or a pythonesque drunken newt… he got better. William has been accused once or twice of drinking like a fish - a congenital disorder shared with his brother and likely passed along from both parents.
