Three amateur swimmers from North Dublin have broken a world record for swimming from Northern Ireland to Scotland.
Rachael Lee, Tom Healy and Ronan Joyce have become the world's fastest one-way, three-person-relay team to swim the North Channel.
They completed the 34.5km route, which is home to thousands of dangerous jellyfish, sharks and a pod of killer whales.
The previous record of 10hrs 18mins was set in 2012 by a one-way, three-person-relay team from the USA called The Machine Men.
Ocean Breakers smashed that record, doing it 38 mins faster.
The swimmers were not allowed to wear wetsuits, and swam in just their togs and swimming caps. They each took it in turn to swim for one hour in repeat cycles.
Ocean Breakers swim for the love of it. Tom and Rachael are full-time fire-fighters and busy parents, and Ronan is an IT professional and dad to eight year old twins.
Speaking straight after the crossing, Rachael said "although we are already seasoned sea swimmers and have been training hard, this was a whole different ball game and took us to the absolute brink of our capabilities".
Tom said "even by our standards it was unbelievably dangerous".
"There was absolutely no way any of us were going give up on each other", he added.
Three paramedics were on board as part of the support crew, because they were swimming through hugely dense congregations of toxic Lion’s Mane jellyfish.
Ocean Breakers began training for the marathon crossing record attempt two years ago.
