‘Plenty of chocolate bars’: first woman swims from Land’s End to John o’Groats

A 23-year-old has become the first woman in the world to swim from Land’s End to John o’Groats.

Jasmine Harrison, from Thirsk in North Yorkshire, completed the gruelling 900-mile swim on Tuesday after about three-and-a-half months of swimming.

The distance is the equivalent of swimming about 58,000 lengths of a 25-metre pool.

The swimming teacher and motivational speaker already holds a world record for being the youngest woman to row solo across the Atlantic in February last year.

Battling thousands of jellyfish, being followed by a shark and swimming into a live military exercise, Harrison swam between four and 12 hours a day after first entering the water at Land’s End in western Cornwall on 1 July.

Her swims were often split into two shifts, broken up by eating and sleeping in her support boat.

Her longest swim was 12 hours, and the maximum distance swum in any one shift was 14 nautical miles – about 16 miles – with 27 nautical miles (31 miles) being the most she covered in one day.

The world record-holder’s top speed during the trip was an impressive 16.1mph.

Much of Harrison’s swimming took place at night, during which, on one occasion, she was approached by a large whale that lurked 1 metre below her, she said.

But that was not her only interaction with the creatures of the ocean. The expert swimmer was stung multiple times on her face, hands and feet by jellyfish.

Harrison sometimes wore a neoprene mask fashioned from a swimming hood to protect her face, which helped, but it failed to prevent the odd small jellyfish drifting into her mouth.

She was closely followed by a basking shark swimming through the whirlpools of the Gulf of Corryvreckan in Scotland and she also swam alongside whales, dolphins and seals when