The noise echoed around all corners of the loch, where fans had positioned themselves on grassy knolls and by big screens along the latter stages, and even the swans moved aside for the beginning of the race.
Simply referred to by the man on the microphone as "Bob from Belize", Gabourel fought his way around two circuits of the loch as the threat of being lapped loomed.
Water surged past, rising from the ground and criss-crossing beneath the heather before tumbling into a nearby loch.
Scallops, crab, langoustines, mussels and lobster are all caught in the loch itself; smoked salmon comes from Inverawe, a few miles south.
His boat bucks along the windy loch and, in the dark woodland beyond our vision, an eagle's eye is caught by the gathering gulls.
Alistair Brownlee's grin was wider than the Strathclyde Park loch he had emerged from minutes earlier.
We are lurching along the loch when the 25 seagulls hanging above our boat suddenly scatter.
This sea loch is almost perfect enough to have been designed by commercial directors.
But they did remind me of a historical footnote from the 1970s when conservation pioneer Sir Peter Scott became involved in efforts to scour the loch for a Nessie-like creature.
Your final destination is a family-run inn in secluded Wester Ross, overlooking a loch and a tiny, pine-covered island.
Reading the glossary, I was amazed by the compressive elegance of its lexis, and its capacity for fine discrimination: a caochan, for instance, is "a slender moor-stream obscured by vegetation such that it is virtually hidden from sight", while a feadan is "a small stream running from a moorland loch", and a fèith is "a fine vein-like watercourse running through peat, often dry in the summer".
