Four swim and shiver in style on Loch Ness

Four Hong Kong swimmers are still celebrating breaking the time record for a four-person relay along a 35.4 kilometer course on Scotland's Loch Ness, a stretch of water that can give you the shivers for the monster said to inhabit its 240-meter depths but more realistically for a water temperature that's bitterly cold all year round at an average 5 degrees Celsius.

The first all-Hong Kong relay team to achieve the swim last Wednesday - Eliza Chang Lai-shan, Angela Ng Hing-wah, Mak Chun-kong, and Ryan Leung Chun-hay - clocked it in 11 hours and 29 minutes, which beat the old record by nine minutes set by four male swimmers in August 2019.

"A miracle," declared team captain Chang, honorary captain of the swimming team of the Law Society of Hong Kong.

Mak started the relay at Fort Augustus and was followed Leung, Chang and then Ng. They kept to this order as they took turns before arriving at Lochend.

And no one pretended to have seen Nessie, a creature described as large, long-necked and with humps. First reported early in the 20th century and backed by suspicious photos, scientists dismiss sightings as hoaxes, wishful thinking and misidentification of objects such as distant craft and tree trunks.