A 13-year-old whose previous longest swim had been 10km swam 64km from Dhanushkodi to Thalaimannar and back, spending eighteen hours and fifty minutes at sea.
Practice puzzle. It does not touch your streak or today's stats.
Kept 'Dhanushkodi' or 'Thalaimannar'? Those are the two shores, and they are the strongest wrong words in the sentence, but name one and you have to name the other, and five words will not hold both. Kept 'back'? That is the return leg, and it is why the distance is 64km and not 32. Kept 'eighteen', 'hours', 'fifty' or 'minutes'? That is how long it took, not what he did. Kept '10km', 'longest' or 'swim'? That is his old best, and it is in there to make 64km mean something. This one really happened. Ishaan S is 13 and lives in Chennai. He went into the water at Dhanushkodi at five on the afternoon of 29 September and came out at Dhanushkodi again at ten to twelve the next morning, eighteen hours and fifty minutes later, having touched Thalaimannar in Sri Lanka in between. Before this the furthest he had swum in the sea was ten kilometres, at Kochi, and five in Goa. He swims in the S14 class and is the first and youngest in it to cross the Palk Strait both ways. His mother, A Sharmila, an IT engineer, kept the time. Two observers from the Sports Development Authority of Tamil Nadu watched the crossing, and four coaches trained him for it. The World Book of Records in London has sent a certificate and a Guinness application has gone in. He also skates, and plays table tennis and badminton.