Shaved and tapered? Not really. Larded up and bouyant more like. The Irish Times Dun Laoghaire Harbour Swim put on a record show yesterday with numbers well up on previous years. Over 90 women and 170 men launched themselves down the life boat shoot and out into the mouth of the pier for the annual jaunt around the yachts.

Cold?

"Ah no. Yeh keep going. The legs might wobble a bit when you get out," said Maeve Brady from the Phoenix Swimming Club, who faced the water with nothing but grim determination as others squeezed tubes of Deep Heat over their anxious limbs.

Some way behind her in the long queue to get into the water was 13year-old Trojan swimmer Julie Roche, a pick of a thing compared to some of the more robust competitors.

The handicap system had decided that the youngest swimmer in the field would wait for a full nine minutes and 15 seconds while her colleagues thrashed their way out towards Howth to a buoy by the middle of the pier.

Roche came in with the fastest swim for the women's race (18 minutes one second), but it was Rachael Lee from Guinness who took the overall race honours in a finger-tip finish against Karen Molloy from Marian.

Lee was also under a considerable handicap of seven minutes and 50 seconds, with Molloy at five minutes, but the younger girl made her way through the shoal to just touch home fractionally before Molloy in the closest finish seen in years.

"The hard part is looking where you are going," said the Guinness swimmer. "You have to keep looking up to see that you are on line. It was a different course to last year."

In the men's event, Gerry Kiersey made more of an emphatic statement, winning by about the length of the ferry boat over a much longer men's course.

The tide would be on the turn, the wind would be from the north east and there would be a bit of a swell, we were informed, as the company director made his way over the last few hundred yards towards land.

Kiersey, from Viking Swimming Club, was one of the high handicaps in the race, but he was able to sustain his pace from the life boat slip to both light houses at the end of the piers and back again.

Overall, the distance was around a mile and a half.

Kevin Williamson, swimming off scratch as befits a former Olympic athlete, earned himself and his club, Terenure, the fastest swim time of 28 minutes and 43 seconds, finishing sixth overall as crowds gathered on the sun-washed pier to see what all the kicking was about.

In ninth place, Shane Moraghan notably splashed his way into the prizes. Moraghan, from the Half Moon club in Dublin, last week swam the English Channel in 101/2 hours. Along with Pat Mannion and Shay Dillon, who also competed in yesterday's harbour race, the swimmers are three of only six Irishmen to have completed the historic route from Dover to Calais.

Phillip Mooney from Guinness came in second, with Half Moon's Ciaran O'Driscoll taking third place.

The team prize for the women's race went to Glenalbyn Masters, with four swimmers - Helena Butterfield, Linda Clarke, Orla Furey and Lisa Howley - coming in the first 12 home.

Half Moon earned the men's team title, with Ciaran O'Driscoll in third, Jason Stynes in fourth, Ken Murray in eighth and Shane Moraghan in ninth.