LAKE MANITOU—Later this month, Ray Scott of Moody Bay will attempt to swim Lake Manitou—the largest freshwater lake on an island in the world—starting his adventure off at the Newby’s Bay government dock and ending at Sandfield, a distance of 19 kilometres.
“This is my first time doing a marathon distance swim,” Ray Scott explained. “Physically I’m ready, but what I can’t control is the weather.”
Mr. Scott has been training for 19 weeks in a lead up to the swim time, which will hopefully be next week. The first weeks of training included short swims almost every day each week leading up to longer and longer swims just a few days a week. On Thursday of last week, Mr. Scott swam nine kilometres and 10 kilometres the following day.
He said he is “reasonably acclimatized” to the cold water, but the unseasonably long and cold winter has definitely affected the lake’s water temperature this summer. Three weeks ago Mr. Scott took water temperature readings from the middle of the lake which registered a chilly 15°C. “At 17° it’s fine, but 15° is too low for me,” he said, adding that swimming in prolonged cool temperatures takes a lot of a swimmer’s strength. While the athlete could swim with a wet suit (this is how he trained in the beginning weeks), he is hoping he will not need it. “Using a wetsuit feels like cheating.” Training with the wetsuit early on also caused a change to Mr. Scott’s stroke technique and form that he was not happy with when it was time to go it with bare skin.
Stories of slathering coldwater swimmers in Vaseline to help stave of the chill are conjecture, he said, with lanolin being of some help, but still offering little effectiveness. What substances like Vaseline or lanolin do help with, however, is chafing. Marathon swimmers get chafed, surprisingly, and Mr. Scott’s underarms have not gone unpunished in this regard.
Another hazard to freshwater swimming is the unexpected allergies Mr. Scott has incurred. Pollen in the lake has wreaked havoc on his sinuses and a box of Kleenex is never far away these days, he joked.
The Lake Manitou marathoner said he has had the idea to swim his beloved lake for the last two years, but finally “committed to it” in early April.
“It’s been a lot of long, boring hours of swimming in the lake,” Mr. Scott said. “The water has been so cold that it’s been hard to train.” But it’s been nice to commune with nature too, he added, pointing to his recent swim with a turtle as well as the gaseous bubbles that often come from the depths below that take on the look of butterflies when they surface.
As for reasons why Mr. Scott is attempting the marathon swim, he responded with a quote from Englishman George Mallory, who is thought to have summitted Mt. Everest in 1924: “Because it’s there.” (Mr. Mallory and his companion hiker both perished in the attempt, however his clothed body, when it was fairly recently discovered, did not count in its effects the photo of his wife he had promised to leave on Everest’s tip so it is conjectured that he likely achieved the summit and perished from cold on the climb down.)
“I live along the shore of Moody Bay and I see the lake every day,” he added. “I haven’t heard of anyone doing it, so I thought that I would give it a try. It’s also a personal challenge—why do you do anything that’s going to be uncomfortable?”
With good weather conditions, he expects the swim to take 12 hours. This will include breaks which will consist of treading water, as well as water and calorie intake to keep his body going.
Normally an actor with the Burns Wharf Theatre Players, and a teacher at Assiginack Public School with the summer off, Mr. Scott said he needed to fill the void and Ray’s Crazy Swim, as he has termed it, was born.
He is also doing the 19-kilometre swim to raise awareness of Manitoulin Family Resources (MFR) and its good deeds in the community. “I see the work they do and I think the work they do is really great,” Mr. Scott said. “If through the swim I can raise awareness of their profile and if it helps someone to pick up the phone to get the help they need, if my swim was able to help promote that, it would be worth it.”
Mr. Scott said he is feeling a strange mixture of anxiety and excitement with the upcoming swim, but one thing is for certain, “it will be nice to take a break from swimming,” when all is said and done.
Stay tuned to future editions of The Expositor and www.manitoulin.ca as this newspaper covers Mr. Scott’s marathon swim.
