Estonian lecturer seeks to swim in as many lakes as possible

A 45-year-old lecturer from Tartu is swimming in as many Estonian lakes as she can, reaching her 149th lake during an interview with ERR’s Pealtnägija programme.

Elisa Kender, a lecturer and mother of three, met the programme at Lake Purgatsi, next to the Nelijärve holiday centre. The late-August water was about 16 degrees Celsius.

Kender said her connection with lakes began in childhood. She grew up in southern Estonia and spent time at her family’s country home near Kanepi in Põlva County. Visits to lakes were a reward after haymaking and weeding, and later became places for village parties and family reunions.

At the beginning of last summer, Kender announced on social media that she planned to swim in 101 lakes during the season.

“I work as a lecturer and have a long holiday. Somehow I came up with the idea of setting a nice SMART goal, a measurable goal, to swim in 101 lakes,” Kender said. She made the plan public because it would have been easy to give up otherwise, she added.

Kender now documents her swims online under the artist name Undiin, a name she has used throughout her life. She said Undiin means a lake nymph or lake spirit and that she first heard the word when she was about 16, when a performance at Vanemuine Theatre made a lasting impression on her.

While about 400 people were interested in her account during the first year, its number of followers grew tenfold this summer. Kender said her toughest audience is her teenage children, who have told her that they do not mention the project to their friends because it is “cringe”.

After systematically recording all her swims in her blog during the first summer, Kender decided that her next goal would be to swim in all of Estonia’s lakes. She had previously worked as a data analyst.

Defining how many lakes Estonia has is difficult, said lake researcher Roland Laarmaa. The national register contains a couple of thousand bodies of water, including unnamed bog pools, artificial water bodies, quarries, ponds and reservoir lakes. Scientists generally use the figure of a couple of thousand lakes, while a survey by a university researcher about a decade ago counted 90,000 ponds, lakes, bog pools and other bodies of standing water from aerial maps.

Kender does not plan to swim in all of them, as many are on private land or otherwise difficult to access.