Last night, she said that memories of the June swim - “the knockers who said I didn’t really get there” - were an impetus for her second attempt.

“I didn’t want to come back and have to try again. I knew I would force myself there. Even if it was bad, I’d put up with it.”

It was better than last time - the combination of wind and currents was favourable - but it was still bad. The seas were heavy overnight when Maroney and her two support boats made slow progress in darkness. She swallowed a lot of seawater. Her ribs hurt. Her tongue became so swollen she had trouble swallowing during the hourly food stops. And, once again, she had hallucinations.

As happened in June, she saw monkeys on the side of the shark cage in which she swam. “I think it was after about 14 hours, when I was getting really tired, that I saw monkeys with their tails hanging down. This time they had their backs to me; last time they seemed to be facing towards me. I’m not sure if it was my eyes or my mind that must have been going.”

Her swim began just before noon on Sunday, Cuban time, from a sea wall in Havana.

The start time, based on positive weather reports, was a day or two earlier than she had expected. She was almost the last one to know. Her brother Michael, 30, knocked on her door on Sunday morning and told her: “Suse, you’re swimming today. We wanted you to have a good sleep last night.”

This time she didn’t wear a wetsuit. Just a black costume, grease and sunscreen, a white cap and goggles. “Last time, I was nervous, this time I was very calm. “At the start, you’re relaxed. You try not to get too excited because it’s such a long time in the water. Then you concentrate on the stroke.”

She distracted herself by watching who was sitting where on the boats, thinking about Havana, singing INXS and Madonna songs to herself, and remembering old episodes of Seinfeld. The hardest thing, she said, was the loneliness - “The challenge is being by yourself for so long” - even though her mother, Pauline, and brother, Michael, were on the boat.

“They’re not getting wet, they’re not in the water turning their arms over,” she said. “They don’t have to put their heads in the water.”

Pauline Maroney felt every stroke her daughter swam. She said it had been a strange way to spend the night of Mothers’ Day, tossed on choppy seas with her daughter in a cage. “Last year, we made a lot of mistakes. This time, Susie was so determined to finish it,” she said.

Once she was ashore, her world became a blur of phone calls and interviews. One, with CNN, ended abruptly

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when Maroney found she couldn’t speak, felt herself sagging and then fainted. Later came a call from The David Letterman Show in New York, asking when she might want to pop in this week.

This was the hardest swim she had ever done. “You don’t know if you can make it. If others have done it before, you think that if they went through the pain, I can do it too.” Yesterday, she found herself where none had gone before.

She is serious about the Mexico to Cuba swim, 42 kilometres more than the Florida crossing, but she thinks the currents will help. Planning has begun.