A 13-year-old swam from India to Sri Lanka, turned round and swam home again

Ishaan S is 13 and lives in Chennai. On Tuesday afternoon he swam out of Dhanushkodi, crossed to Sri Lanka, turned round and came home again. It took him 18 hours and 50 minutes. The furthest he had ever swum in the sea before was ten kilometres.

3 October 2026

Flat grey-green sea at Dhanushkodi under a cloudy sky, with four small wooden fishing boats moored offshore and no land visible on the horizon — The water at Dhanushkodi, where he went in. Sri Lanka is about thirty kilometres away and you cannot see it from the beach.
Photo: Sidharth.D., via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0

Ishaan S, who is 13 and lives in Chennai, went into the sea at Dhanushkodi at five on Tuesday afternoon, swam across to Thalaimannar on the Sri Lankan side, turned round and swam back, and came out of the water at ten to twelve the next morning. The crossing was 64 kilometres and took him 18 hours and 50 minutes, the news agency PTI reported.

He is the first swimmer in the S14 class to do the Palk Strait in both directions, and the youngest, according to PTI. Ishaan has been diagnosed with an intellectual disability, with autism and with ADHD, and S14 is the para-swimming class for swimmers with an intellectual impairment.

Before this

The furthest he had ever swum in the sea was ten kilometres, at Kochi, and before that five kilometres in Goa, his mother said. A Sharmila is 39 and works as an IT engineer, and it was she who gave the finishing time to reporters.

In the two years before the crossing he won eight gold medals and two silvers at Tamil Nadu state and national para-swimming meets. He skates as well, and plays table tennis and badminton.

Satellite photograph of the sea between India and Sri Lanka, with India at the top left, Sri Lanka at the lower right, and a pale chain of shallows and sandbanks running between the two coasts — The gap he swam, from orbit. India is top left, Sri Lanka lower right, and the pale line between them is a chain of shallows and sandbanks.
Photo: NASA, via Wikimedia Commons, public domain

The crossing

Two observers watched the swim, Sathish Udhayakumar for the Sports Development Authority of Tamil Nadu and Maria Rodger Fernando as event observer, so that the time and the route would stand up. Four coaches had trained him for it, Gopi C, Selvam R, Karthik G and Saravanan D.

A wide empty beach of pale sand at Talaimannar in Sri Lanka, with low hummocks across it and the sea breaking in a thin white line along the far edge under a clear sky — Thalaimannar, the Sri Lankan shore. He touched it, turned round, and went back the way he had come.
Photo: Alexey Komarov, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Afterwards

The World Book of Records in London has sent him a certificate for the swim. His mother said the family is applying to Guinness World Records as well.

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The swim, the times, the distance, the record claim and the names of the observers and coaches are from a Press Trust of India report filed from Chennai on 1 October 2026, which quotes Ishaan’s mother, A Sharmila. Photographs via Wikimedia Commons: the sea at Dhanushkodi by Sidharth.D. (CC BY 4.0), the beach at Thalaimannar by Alexey Komarov (CC BY-SA 4.0), and the satellite view by NASA (public domain). None of them shows Ishaan; we have no photograph of him we are free to publish.