On August 1 and 2, Nick Pelletier plans to swim the length of Okanagan Lake from north to south
An ultra-endurance athlete from Kelowna, B.C., is getting ready for his third and last try to swim the length of Okanagan Lake and break the Guinness record.
Nick Pelletier, who is 25 years old, wants to swim from the north arm of the lake, which is about 10 kilometers northwest of Vernon, B.C., to the SS Sicamous Museum in Penticton, which is about 106 kilometers away. He wants to do this in less than 40 hours, starting at 4 a.m. Pacific Time on August 1 and finishing before 8 p.m. August 2.
Pelletier won’t stop to sleep while he’s swimming. Twenty people will follow him in two motorized boats and two kayaks to keep track of his progress and give him food and water.
“I’m not touching anything while I’m eating,” he told CBC’s Chris Walker.Daybreak South on Monday morning.
The record was set in 2016 at Okanagan Lake
Adam Ellenstein, from Detroit, set the Guinness record for the fastest swim across Okanagan Lake on July 25 and 26, 2016. He did it in 40 hours, 57 minutes, and 11 seconds.
At the time, Ellenstein was 39 years old. He said he had trained for the swim for two years to raise money for people with Parkinson’s disease, like his aunt Susan Scarlett.
Scarlett was part of a group of 19 people who helped Ellenstein during his swim. They gave him a sugar-and-protein drink all the time and sometimes swam with him.
In July 2016, Scarlett told CBC News, “This swim has never been done before, and Adam wants to do it the fastest.” “He sets the standard.”
Pelletier says he asked Ellenstein for help planning his epic swim, which was an idea that came to him in the first few months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I couldn’t go abroad on my other trips, so I had to look in my own country,” he said.
But Pelletier had trouble the first two times he tried to beat Ellenstein’s record.
In 2020, he got sores on his back and shoulders where his full-body wetsuit rubbed against him. In 2021, he wore a sleeveless wetsuit to reduce chafing, but he broke his wrist because he didn’t know how to swim properly.
“I had to swim with one arm against the headwinds for hours until it got too hard and I started to get cold.”
Helping the Canadian Mental Health Association raise mone
Even with these problems, Pelletier raised $13,000 for BrainTrust Canada, a non-profit organization in Kelowna that helps people with brain injuries. The organization is called BrainTrust Canada.
This time, he wants to raise $10,000 for the Kelowna branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association.
Even though Pelletier can’t promise to break the Guinness record, he says he’s ready to take on the challenge.
“You can’t look at it as a big job as a whole. I have to look at it as 106 one-kilometer swims instead of a 106-kilometer swim, so it’s about making up for the kilometers you’ve already swum.”