Woman's "amazing adventure" as she swims around beautiful St Helena in record time
After finding a passion for open water swimming, Dina Levačić (Croatia) broke a record by circling the island of Saint Helena – home of record-breaking legend Jonathan the tortoise.
As well as being the place the oldest living land animal calls home, the remote island in the South Atlantic Ocean poses a major challenge to swimmers.
Diving in head first, Dina claimed the record for fastest circumnavigation swim around Saint Helena (female) in an astonishing time of 17 hr 13 min 28 sec.
Her swim, on 26 February, was ratified by Open Water Africa and the World Open Water Swimming Association.
St Helena is 16 km (10 mi) long and 8 km (5 mi) wide and the ocean distance around its perimeter is about 60 km (37 mi).
PhD student Dina, 30, decided to take on the challenge after seeing a post about it on Facebook.
“I recognized it not just as an amazing swim but as an amazing adventure that I just couldn’t miss out on,” she told us.
“Logistics around the swim were quite demanding but when it comes to the swim itself, the last couple of hours was quite hard mentally and physically. Every stroke was a decision to make one more stoke.”
Dina prepared for her attempt by training at the pool, swimming up to 70 km every week, as well as hitting the gym a couple times a week.
She found a love for swimming after the first time her parents took her and her sister to the pool when she was four years old. After honing her skills in the Adriatic Sea, she went open water swimming for the first time when she was just nine and said it was “love at first swim”.
But that didn’t mean the St Helena challenge would be easy.
Dina said: “I knew I had a rough and hard swim ahead of me so I never expected it to be easy so I would say that everything went in a line with expectations.”
Read about more epic feats like this in our Sports and Fitness section.
In the last 20 years, Dina has done all the Oceans7 swims, the Irish Triple Crown and Original Triple Crown, some of the Toughest 13 swims, and many other challenges across six continents and 20 countries.
Of this record-breaking swim, she said: “I would like to thank the team behind this swim, nothing would be possible without them. It’s a solo swim but a team effort.”
While Dina is the first woman to ever claim this record, two men have claimed the male equivalent.
Angus McPherson (South Africa) did it first on 10 March in a time of 20 hr 2 min 14 sec and Ryan Stramrood (South Africa) did it nine days later in 16 hr 50 min 42 sec.
It’s been a busy year on St Helena!