The Longest Fresh Water Relay Swim In The World….

New World Record

These four amazing ladies, Samantha Farrow, Tracy Mistry, Claire Poole and Caroline Saxon have just completed the first four person team relay swim on Windermere and entered the record books for the longest continuous 4 person fresh water relay swim in the world.

They completed 13 lengths of Windermere in a time of 77 hours and 39 minutes, covering 136.5 miles / 219.7km.

Their home for four days was our little Shetland 2+2 named after our dear friend Kyle Morley, who I know would have been in awe of what they have just achieved. Powered by a small 20hp Honda outboard the whole endeavour only used 33 litres of fuel ( we consumed a similar amount of tea and hot chocolate! ). The inside will probably never be the same again but I can live with that 🙂

 

As with all challenges of this scale we couldn’t have done it without the support of a huge team, from those who stayed behind to run the venues to the ground and boat crews who were there day in day out to ensure everything ran smoothly. I know their efforts have been greatly appreciated by the swimmers and I want to add my thanks to Joe, Ray, Nick, Jane M, Mark and to Kevin who spent 66 hours out of the 77 looking after the team making sure they were warm, dry, fed and watered, without whom this whole adventure would have been a completely different experience for the worse.

A special thank you also goes to Elterwater Hostel in Ambleside for being so flexible with us, if you’re looking for a clean, comfortable, reasonably priced accommodation around Windermere then this is definitely worth a visit.

Now we know people like statistics so we’re collating the log and additional information which will be posted shortly. Needless to say the Strava records form the swimmers, Tracker information from the boat, GPS coordinates from the Garmin plus the hundreds of assorted pictures, videos and lake side cctv screen grabs are going to take one tired swimmer and an organiser a little while to type up so please be patient if stats are your thing.

For now I’m happy to show you what achieving a new world record looks like on a swimmers face …

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mark and Tracy we’re so sorry you missed your first anniversary together, we promise not to undertake any hair brained schemes next September! ( August is fine though right ??)

 

I would like to leave the last word on this thank you to Dee Llewellyn who posted this on social media after the 10th length was achieved on Saturday, her team have held the record since 2011 and with the sad passing of their pilot and friend Chris Ducker I started this challenge with a degree of trepidation so it was a huge relief to see her and Liane kayaking out to meet Claire on Saturday and to see that they were 100% behind us.

“Had a fab time kayaking on Windermere yesterday – after a frosty morning with great inversions the sun burned through. It was nice to see the swimyourswim team in the process of breaking our world record – we have to give it to them – they were awesome. Claire Poole was part of the reason Liane Llewellyn Hickling and I ended up doing open water swimming (so very emotional 😭) Many have attempted it and failed – it was a tough challenge and took a strong team to beat this. Enjoy your glory now xx”

 

Now to find a very gentle sports massage therapist and a jacuzzi for a month!!

These Girls Did.