The Swimming Ponies Of Chincoteague

On the third Wednesday of July, and for the past 94 years, the wild Chincoteague Ponies of Assateague Island, whose ancestry on these shores dates back to the late 1700s, take an annual swim across the Assateague Channel to the town of Chincoteague. Here, for one week, they are admired by tens of thousands of spectators from around the world and cared for by locals and volunteers.

- Ken Amorosano

The quaint tourist destination on Virginia’s Eastern Shore is a gateway to Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge on Assateague Island, where its pristine beaches serve as a refuge for this admirable herd of wild horses.

It was a fortunate and somewhat coincidental happenchance during a driving tour of the Eastern Seaboard this summer that my wife Lucinda and I found ourselves within driving distance of Chincoteague Island. With hardly a second thought, we decided to make the detour to witness firsthand this truly remarkable equine event.

The Chincoteague pony swim is a weeklong tradition that begins days before the actual swim with the roundup of the Southern Herd of around 150 adult ponies, that along with 60 to 70 foals are driven to the Southern Corral on Assateague Island. The task falls to the Saltwater Cowboys, a group of horseback volunteers who perennially tend to the herds. Next, the Saltwater Cowboys round up the Northern Herd of about 100 adult ponies and their foals and drive them to the island’s Northern Corral.

On Monday, at daybreak, the cowboys move the ponies from the Northern Corral out to the beachfront then south along the Atlantic Ocean, where they join the ponies in the Southern Corral. Here, all ponies are vet-checked and accessible for public viewing.

We arrived the day before the Pony Swim and immediately headed to the Southern Corral where we joined several hundred other visitors to view and photograph the ponies. The ponies’ pinto and paint markings—in patterns designated as overo, tobiano, savino, and tovero—creates an assemblage of some of the most handsome horses of any breed. Seeing so manymild-mannered and colorful ponies and their foals was heartwarming and well worth the effort.