Joel Matos Ortiz - British Virgin Islands to Puerto Rico 92km
IronMike
Northern VirginiaCharter Member
Anyone with better Spanish than my 30+ year old proficiency want to take a gander at this supposed record attempt? (That book is mentioned again...)
They're talking about this in my Russian open water group on FB. A Puerto Rican swimmer by the name of Joel Matos Ortiz will attempt 100km 92km swim from P.R. to British Virgin islands "in 45 hours to set a record for the Guinness Book."
No mention of Sarah Thomas in the article. 
We're all just carbon, water, starlight, oxygen and dreams
Comments
In another article it says:
translation: "world record for the fastest swim between BVI and PR" -- or in MSF-preferred lingo, a "course record."
This raises the question of who else has done the swim?
There are a few articles and they all have the same text, so it's most probably a press note from the organization, distributed during the press conference held in March introducing the event.
The only source of information, apparently, is the FB page of the organization https://www.facebook.com/pg/UltraChallengeCaribbean/posts/ No information about route, rules, logistics... Just the rough distance (100K), estimated time (45h) and departure/arrival points.
In the FB page of the guy (Joel Matos https://www.facebook.com/JMOUltraSwimmer/?ref=py_c ) there are posts of previous long swimmings, but again no information about them. At least, in all the pics and videos I've seen from him, he's swimming in skins.
As for the "record": Guiness only accepts superlative records: longest, tallest, fastest, and other "most of". I guess the organization is using the Guiness thing as a commercial bait, but then they need to approach them this way. "First crossing" of that straits couldn't be registered, but "fastest crossing between Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico" would - as it would any other crossing, between 2 points with a clearly defined distance, regardless whether there have been other attempts or not. And who wouldn't want his name engraved between "exposition with more bottles of tequila", "biggest pyramid made of plastic glasses" and "most people unboxing simultaneously"? (from the Latin American Press Center of Guiness) http://www.guinnessworldrecords.es/news/press#
dieciseisgrados.com/
There is a report of Joel having done 12 miles around Key West in 2017. If I translate it correctly, he was quite sick because of his nutrition and found certain parts of it tough, mentally. I'm assuming he's sorted out his nutrition in the past 2 years. Following his training, he did a 12 hour swim in April as part of his prep. I haven't unearthed anything else yet, but this big swim is for a Children's Foundation. It's due to begin on May 24th.
Haven't heard anything about this in our region. Will definitely have to try to follow as we prepare for our second annual event as well.
Joel started from White Beach, Jost Van Dyke, BVI around 18:40 local time (UTC-4).
His target according to the promotional material is Parque Las Croabas, near Fajardo, Puerto Rico. By my reckoning this is a minimum route of 91.2 km .... however there are some islands along the way that could produce a longer route if used as enforcing waypoints.
Track his progress at https://track.rs/4/
Good grief!!! That is a very long swim.
@evmo, what are those long lines set far between two red dots in the track.rs? Did his cell or Spot lose reception?
We're all just carbon, water, starlight, oxygen and dreams
He's using a spot tracker, and in this case it just means a temporary loss of reception. You can confirm this by looking at the speed plot.
Just over halfway @ 20 hours elapsed!
Go Joel! https://track.rs/4
great effort hopefully a smooth 2nd half
Wonder what happened here (~ 2am local time last night). It's about a half-hour detour, as if the boat went back to get something.
Less than 10k to finish!
He explained on a live video online that they faced some difficulties with one of the boats, which had to be rescued. Looks like he's finished now!