Ray Scott did it! And much faster than he thought he would.
‘Ray’s Crazy Swim‘ as the venture became known, took the Manitoulin Island schoolteacher and actor, just nine hours. He thought it would take closer to 12 hours.
He swam the 19 kilometres in a wet suit, as the water temperatures this summer are so low due to the long winter and the unusually cool summer.
Ray Scott, 44, lives on the shore of Lake Manitou, the world’s largest freshwater island lake, and he’d trained for triathlons in the water before, but he said he started to think about swimming the entire length of the lake a few years back.
After training for 19 weeks, he’d planned to swim last Friday morning but the temperature of the lake had dropped to 8.5 degrees Celsius.
Scott’s wife, Ann-Marie, was in one of the accompanying boats cheering him on yesterday, trying to get him to sing as he swam, to keep the pace going. She said the first couple of kilometres and the last four were the most challenging.
Starting out at 7:10 am he encountered some pretty choppy conditions with the waves hitting him broadside, but the water calmed eventually. The last four kilometres were tough as the fatigue was setting in, but Ray Scott managed to complete the challenge, emerging from the water at 4:07 pm.
Ray Scott is dedicating the swim to Manitoulin Family Resources (MFR) “I see the work they do and I think the work they do is really great,” Ray Scott told the Manitoulin Expositor. “If through the swim I can raise awareness of their profile and if it helps someone to pick up the phone to get the help they need, if my swim was able to help promote that, it would be worth it.”
Manitoulin Island is in Lake Huron, at the mouth of Georgian Bay, part of the Great Lakes.
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