Well done to all involved.
At 5.11pm on Monday, a trio of Irish swimmers broke a world record, swimming The North Channel from Donaghadee, Down, to Portpatrick in Scotland.
Ocean Breakers, three amateur swimmers from North Dublin - Rachael Lee, Tom Healy and Ronan Joyce - have broken the world record to become the world’s fastest one-way, three-person-relay team to swim the North Channel from Northern Ireland to Scotland.
The swim is considered to be one of the most difficult open water swims in the world and crosses the North Channel; 34.5km of the most hostile, erratic and cold waters in the Irish Sea.
The previous record of 10hrs 18mins had been set in 2012 by a one-way, three-person-relay team from the USA called The Machine Men but Ocean Breakers managed to best this record by an impressive 58 minutes.
They each took it in turn to swim for one hour in repeat cycles until they made it across the North Channel to Scotland.
Three paramedics were on board as part of the support crew, and because they were swimming through hugely dense congregations of toxic Lion’s Mane jellyfish all three swimmers needed some element of medical attention due to the high levels of jellyfish poison their bodies absorbed during the crossing.
Ocean Breakers aren’t professional swimmers. Tom and Rachael are full-time firefighters and busy parents to six-year-old twins Bruce and Lex, while Ronan, who is married to Ann Marie, is a full-time IT professional and father to eight-year-old twins Anna and Rian.
The trio did the swim to try to raise awareness of how we all can keep the sea clean for the fish and the people who swim there.
“Plastic is an important part of all our lives and all we need to do is to put our waste in the proper bins so it can get disposed of and recycled in the right way," Rachael said.
"Unlike other countries, Ireland is really lucky to have a brilliant waste infrastructure, so let's use it properly and plastics won't end up in our lovely sea."
Speaking after the crossing, Tom said: "Even by our standards it was unbelievably dangerous endurance swimming at the very edge of human limits which is why we did it as a relay team – no matter how hard it got, there was absolutely no way any of us were going give up on each other because we were in it together come hell or high water."
