Nearly 100 hardy souls descended on Shelly Bay beach to take part in the Open Water Bermuda National Championships on Sunday morning.

Heavy winds and rain forced event organisers to switch the venue from Clearwater Beach less than 24 hours earlier but that failed to deter 99 swimmers aged between 8 and 64 who decided to take the plunge.

It was the husband and wife due of Bradley and Nina Coetzer who occupied the first two places over the longest distance of 5km and the Sunday lunch table in their household may have made for interesting eavesdropping, with the pair swimming alongside each other for much of the race before Bradley kicked clear to win in a time of 1hr 15min 47sec.

That was 12 seconds quicker than his partner and more than half a minute ahead of the third-placed finisher Eduoard von Herberstein.

The 1500m event attracted most participants with youth coming to the fore with 13-year-old Dominic Wright taking top honours in a time of 22:29. That was just nine seconds ahead of 14-year-old runner-up Logan Jones, with Jackson Langley coming home in third.

Young swimmers also beat out experience in the 400m race as 14-year-old Joseph Lau (6:45) beat 10-year-old Walker Smith (7:00) into second. Steven Smith, aged 51, struck a blow for experience to finish third.

The switch to Shelly Bay did not come without its issues as a number of competitors were stung by jellyfish during the course event and race organiser Michael Cash said that can be a hazard around this time of year.

“Unfortunately, the jellyfish tend to push into the lee to try and find shelter and in one of the corners of the course there were some moon jellys,” Cash said.

“I’m old enough that I have run into a number of jellyfish, including Portuguese man o’ war, but I think a number of younger kids competing had probably never had a jellyfish sting before and they reacted to it because they didn’t know what they were facing.

“There was never anything medically threatening, but unfortunately sometimes we have bad jelly years and this seems to be a bad one in the last month or so, but it was nothing serious fortunately.”