Zemaitis brothers conquer Lake Ontario and become the first to complete the Stillwater Eight

Solo Swims of Ontario is very excited to announce that John and Joe Zemaitis are the first to complete the Stillwater Eight challenge!

Swimming tandem, on July 23, 2025, they conquered Lake Ontario from Queen’s Royal Park in Niagara-on-the-Lake to Marilyn Bell Park in Toronto in 17:17:01. This is a distance of 50.5 km or 31.4 miles

The brothers have swim over 80 marathon swims and over 40 races around the world together and are IMSHOF Honor swimmers. The long swims database reports that they swam the following Stillwater 8 swims: the Sea of Galilee November 15, 2019, Lake Malawi July 10, 2023, Loch Ness August 8, 2018, Lake Tahoe July 29, 2020, Lake Taupo February 20, 2022, Lake Titicaca March 27, 2024 and Lake Zurich July 26, 2015. 

They started the Lake Ontario swim at 10:17 pm on July 22. The conditions were far from ideal with waves on the entire crossing. They overcame 1-2 foot waves hitting them broadside with whitecaps for the first 5 hours, and 3-4 foot confused waves with whitecaps broadside threatening to blow them off course for a couple of hours at the end. A nasty oncoming 1 mph current encountered between 13 and 6 miles from shore cut their usual over 2 mph pace to 1 mph. Fortunately, the water temperature at the end had warmed up to 68-70 degrees F from the 56 degrees of a few days previously. The brothers determinedly swam through all these obstacles without complaint.