Foveaux Strait swimmer Chloe Harris sleeps it off

Tuesday, 2 February 2016

After a gruelling eight-and-a-half hour slog, marathon swimmer Chloe Harris is having a well-deserved sleep.

After crossing Foveaux Strait in what is believed to be record time, Harris was on a high all night.

But after an exhausting effort, Graham Harris said his daughter wasn't available for an interview because she had 'conked out'.

'She's laid up in bed, she's recovering,' he said.

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'She was kept awake last night on a high, up late then conked out.'

As with any endurance swimming, Chloe's arms were a bit sore after arriving on the Bluff coastline.

Harris said Chloe, who completed the 34km journey in the unofficial time of eight-and-a-half hours, wasn't looking towards other major swimming events for the moment after successfully crossing the Strait and completing the 17.5km Epic Swim in Taupo last month.

'She's not looking really any further than that,' he said.

Chloe was the first female home at the Epic Swim, held on Lake Taupo with a time of 4hr 33min.

Harris said there was no official word on whether his daughter had broken Todd Utteridge's 1989 record of 8hr 40 min and wasn't sure when the satellite data, which monitored Chloe's progress, would be available.

'That tends to take a while,' Harris said of the data configuration process.

Originally from Suffolk in the United Kingdom, Chloe lived in Invercargill for four years before moving to Christchurch in 2012 with her family, where she is now a member of the North Beach Surf Club.

During her time in Invercargill she trained at Splash Palace with the late SBS Bank boss Wayne Evans, who was a Southland masters swimmer.

Chloe had been training for the treacherous swim across one of New Zealand's most dangerous bodies of water for more than nine months, but said Evans, who died in January, was her real inspiration behind her swim from Stewart Island to Bluff.

'He was probably one of the hardest workers out there, hardest trainers,' she said on Monday.

'He was pretty much the person you wanted to emulate.'