| Loch Ness is really too cold for a
casual swim. The average temperature is 50°F, and it's never
lukewarm. But it's a challenge that competitive swimmers and boaters
enjoy.
Most recently, Australian "Superfish" Tammy Van Wisse
set a new record for swimming the 24 mile length of the Loch in
1999. Her time of 9 hours and 6 minutes was 15 minutes faster than
the previous record.
"People always want to know how I keep my mind together. Sometimes while you’re doing a swim you start to think ‘Why am I here?’ Your arms feel soooooo heavy and you just feel soooooo bad and you really do hit rock bottom. I try to listen to a lot of music before a swim and I memorise it. I find I have the ability to switch on tapes in my mind and then when I get low I can just go with a beat and it picks me up again.
"I have the crew to thank too – my brother John is always with me and because he’s a swimmer he understands what I go through. Sometimes he’ll write jokes on a board to keep me laughing, or he’ll give me information on how many strokes-per-minute I’m doing and what the weather’s like. The crew have to live through the experience with me."
The picture above shows Tammy's crew feeding her.
John Rhodes Cobb raced both cars and motorboats. On Sept.
29, 1952, John broke world speed records for a motorboat while
racing on Loch Ness. As he surpassed 200 mph, his boat
disintegrated. He was pulled alive from the lake and died later that
day at Inverness, Scotland. His record didn't count because the
standards for setting motorboat speed records require the boat to break
previous records going opposite directions. A memorial for John
Rhodes Cobb stands near the southern end of Loch Ness.
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