The 90-day swim that united New Zealand behind ocean conservation

Source : ABC NEWS

The final phase of any epic voyage can so often carry conflicting emotions.

That ceaseless desire to reach one’s final destination is always tempered by the knowledge that once the arrival takes place, a significant phase of your life has concluded.

For marathon swimmer Jono Ridler, those thoughts were amplified by the sound of a multitude of supporters cramming every possible vantage point on Wellington’s harbourside to cheer their man home.

Time, so often a driving factor in any record attempt, can warp in such instances.

Ridler was going to make certain he would take the time to enjoy and remember this moment.

“I remember popping my head up about 50 metres before we entered the lagoon and just hearing the noise of the crowd all around and seeing all of these people,” Ridler tells ABC Sport.

“I was just completely blown away by just how many people were there.

“It was insane, insane numbers of people. Swimming under the footbridge into the lagoon, doing a bit of backstroke and just looking around at all of these people lining the lagoon and coming in and ultimately finishing and seeing everybody that was there … There were thousands and thousands of people. It was just incredible.

“I stopped a few times to just pop my head up and appreciate it, not wanting to get to the final point, but just really soaking everything in, knowing that this was a very, very unique moment.

“People were going to capture it through film and the like, but the actual experience of being there in that moment, that would pass by very, very quickly.

“I think it was representative of how people really came around the story of what we were doing and what we represented.”

Advocating for a cleaner ocean through swimming

The crowd were justified in their attendance — on hand to see the completion of the longest unassisted staged swim in history.

It had been 90 days since the 36-year-old had set out from Waikuku Beach at North Cape, the very northernmost point of New Zealand’s North Island.

When he eventually touched land at Wellington’s Whairepo Lagoon, greeted by all those thousands of supporters, he had swum a colossal 1,367km — spending 468 hours in the water.

His perseverance had seemingly enthralled the entire country, all captivated by his dedication and the cause he was swimming for — an end to bottom trawling, a commercial fishing technique where heavy weighted nets are dragged across the sea floor, indiscriminately destroying habitats and negatively impacting biodiversity.

“Our purpose was quite clear,” Ridler says.

“It was about bringing Kiwis — and the world as it’s kind of happened — around the need to protect our ocean and the race for a healthy ocean.

“I grew up around the ocean. A lot of Kiwi kids do. I’ve had some amazing experiences and that’s just been built on through my ocean swimming experiences as well.

“I was spending a lot of time in the ocean and developing this really strong connection with that environment and together, those two things collided: The passion of ocean swimming and the purpose piece around wanting to do more for our oceans, having seen some of the devastation and depletion, even over my lifetime.”

New Zealand has the fourth-largest exclusive economic zone of any country on earth, an area of around 4 million square kilometres.

Of that, the nation’s maritime territory is 15 times that of its landmass.

It’s one of the most important stretches of water in the world, too, from the northernmost Kermadec Islands in the subtropical waters of the South Pacific to the subantarctic Campbell Islands in the south, a range of latitudes that makes the impacts of climate change particularly evident.

And yet, just 0.4 per cent of that maritime area is currently protected, compared to around 30 per cent of New Zealand’s land area.

“Clearly something is not quite right there,” Ridler says.

“It’s about protecting this for future generations, making sure that the abundance that we have had in the past, the abundance of old, is restored, and we can make sure that that’s sustained for the future.”

Ridler has been an ocean swimmer for about 15 years, swimming all three of New Zealand’s major open water challenges: Cook Strait (23km) in 2019, Lake Taupō (40.4km) in 2020, and the Foveaux Strait (28.6km) in 2021 — at that time one of only 10 people to have done so.

His desire to raise awareness of the plight of the ocean in his immediate backyard prompted him to get in touch with Live Ocean, a conservation charity established in 2019 by legendary New Zealand sailors Blair Tuke and Peter Burling.

In 2023, under the Live Ocean banner, Ridler completed a 99km, non-stop, no-wetsuit swim from Great Barrier Island to Campbells Bay on Auckland’s North Shore, swimming for over 33 hours in tough conditions.

That was the longest unassisted continuous open-water swim ever in New Zealand and was completed to raise awareness of the efforts to protect the Hauraki Gulf, the body of water just off the coast of Auckland that Ridler had just traversed.

The advocacy clearly worked. The Hauraki Gulf Tīkapa Moana Marine Protection Bill was passed into law in October 2025, establishing 19 new marine protection areas.

Swimming from the top of the North Island to Wellington was just the next “crazy” idea Ridler had.

Sharks, jellyfish and salt tongue

Ridler is speaking to ABC Sport from his home in Auckland just days after completing his swim.

All things considered, he is looking incredibly well: A little sun-tanned, the imprint of his goggles evident as faint panda marks around his eyes — eyes that betray the deep-seated fatigue that is an understandable consequence of such a monumental physical effort.

His hair has been bleached by a combination of sun and salt, his shoulders and chest still swollen by the gruelling physical exertion of completing an estimated 1.4 million strokes since January 5.

But otherwise, remarkable.

“I feel pretty good,” Ridler says.

“My body’s in good nick, all things considered. I was battling a lot while we were in the thick of it, but coming out the other side of it and not feeling like I’ve got any major injuries to contend with is … I’m very, very happy with that.

“As you say, I’m a bit tired, I think there’s some sleep to catch up on, but there’s time to do that.”

In marathon swimming, unassisted means no wetsuit, no flippers and no intentional physical contact with support boats. Just swimming trunks, goggles, a hat and ear plugs.

Staged means that once he had done his swimming for the day, a GPS marker was dropped and that was where he would resume after getting some rest and some food.

Having breaks does not mean this was some frivolous splash down the coast.

Ridler would regularly swim anything up to 11 hours a day, split into two blocks, starting before sunrise and ending after the sun had dropped down behind New Zealand’s inexplicably beautiful hills.

The water temperature was often below 15 degrees, while sunburn was a genuine risk in the swim’s earliest stages.

Add mouth ulcers and the dreaded salt tongue — a condition that badly corrodes the tongue and leaves it bleeding, barely mitigated by swilling coconut oil and Manuka honey — and you have a true test.

And he wasn’t alone.

“There were a lot of jellyfish in the water, barbed wire jellyfish or string jellyfish is what they’re called,” Rilder says, estimating he was stung over 100 times in the last few weeks.

“The sting is painful and it’s annoying, but it does go away but what lasts is the itching. I’d be waking up in the middle of the night, itching all over my body, putting lotions and whatever else on to stop that from happening.

“Jumping into the water, knowing that I was going to, by the end of that session, be mildly hypothermic and probably have picked up a few jellyfish stings while being sore, while being tired — it wasn’t easy getting in the water by any means.”

Then there were sharks.

“Within the first 90 minutes of starting from Waikuku Beach I had a flyby from a great white shark,” Ridler recalls.

“We had shark sightings for the first week or so. That was always something that played on my mind, particularly when I was getting into dark and murky water.”

Live Ocean and the Black Foils

Tuke and Burling didn’t have to worry about sharks all that much during careers in which they won Olympic gold in the 49er Class at the Rio Games of 2016 as well as multiple world championships before becoming three-time Americas Cup-winning sailors.

But they were certainly exposed to other issues around the world that heightened their awareness of the issues facing the global ocean ecosystem.

“Obviously, we’ve got a connection and a responsibility because of how many hours we spend on the ocean,” Tuke tells ABC Sport.

“When you’re in the likes of Rio or you’re racing in Asia or in Europe, wherever it might be, you’re seeing the different effects that those populations are having on the ocean.

“Rio’s a classic example. Guanabara Bay and the Sugarloaf Mountain there, and up to the hills and white-sand beaches … that is, in my opinion, probably the nicest harbour in the world.

“And then you see what it’s turned into.

“When we were there, the water quality was terrible and it’s like, how have we let it get to this stage?”

Their connection with the ocean is unquestioned; the challenge of preserving it for future generations, one they have embraced with the same dedication that saw them stand on an Olympic podium at three consecutive Games.

Competing in the Ocean Race in 2017/18, a round-the-world yacht race, opened Tuke’s eyes to the potential that sport could have in helping spread a positive message.

“There was a team in the Ocean Race called Turn the Tide on Plastic, and they were a racing team, but they had ‘turn the tide on plastic’ written on the side of the boat, all over their sails,” Tuke recalls.

“Wherever they went around the world, they were running this campaign and they were getting on the Sky TVs and all the mainstream media as they went because they were racing for a purpose.

“They actually weren’t racing that well, but they were still connecting.

“At that stage we realised there’s something bigger here than what we have probably been giving it credit and that’s that’s where we decided, OK, now we want to do something that’s bigger than just trying to win sailing races.

“We came back and thought, well, ocean conservation, it’s close to us, it’s natural to us and we’ve got to, if we can, intertwine that into our sailing going forward and then we can get real cut-through.”

According to the Live Ocean website, the charity has raised $NZ12.4million ($10.3million) to help fund 20 projects in the past six years.

That’s some cut-through.

“It was always about using the power of sport to shine a light on great science or the issues or the beauties of the ocean,” Tuke says.

“And Jono’s mission here is just an extension, in the best possible way. It’s like a supercharged version of what we’re doing.”

Speedos-advocacy a growing trend

Using long-distance swims is not a new way to raise awareness of environmental issues, with speedo-advocacy seemingly an effective way to show the impact human activity has on the oceans.

Led by British swimmer Lewis Pugh — who was the first person to complete a long-distance swim in every ocean of the world and has been the United Nations Patron of the Oceans since 2013 — swimmers have repeatedly highlighted issues in oceans around the world.

Comedian David Walliams raised several million pounds for Comic Relief by swimming the English Channel in 2006, the Strait of Gibraltar in 2008 and the length of the River Thames in 2011.

Another Brit, Ross Edgley, completed a wet-suited, 2,860km swim around the entire island of Great Britain in 2018 over 157 days, later attempting other awareness-raising swims in Loch Ness, Lake Trasimeno, 510km down the Yukon River in Canada, and around Iceland.

What makes this form of advocacy successful isn’t clear.

Perhaps it’s what the fragility a single swimmer against the power of the ocean represents, an individual surrendering themselves entirely to a force beyond their power to control, not in attempt to control but to survive.

“There’s got to be something there, right?” Tuke says.

“He’s there in his togs, his goggles and his swim cap and that’s it, from the top to the bottom [of the North Island] … people love seeing people push the boundaries of what’s possible as a human, and Jono did just that.”

And it’s working.

At the Australian Open swimming championships this week, New Zealand’s world and Commonwealth Games champion Lewis Clareburt told ABC Sport he was well aware of Ridler’s swim and — although he considered it completely mad — was full of admiration for his fellow countryman.

“If I was to talk to him, like, first of all I’d say you’re crazy,” Clareburt noted with a broad smile.

“But secondly, like, what an awesome thing to do. He had a goal of stopping bottom trawling in New Zealand [and] I genuinely think he got the whole country around it.

“What he did was pretty amazing. To see everyone in the harbour watching him coming in was pretty awesome.”

Harbour finale a stunning finish, but not the end

Once Ridler came into Whairepo Lagoon, his swim was over, but the job of ocean advocacy was not done.

It still isn’t, in truth. It may never be.

Once Rider stepped on dry land he immediately led a group 1.5km to the New Zealand parliament building and met politicians — who attended even on a Saturday over Easter weekend — handing over his swim cap and a scroll with the petition’s statement written on it.

As of writing, that petition had more than 80,000 signatures. The team hope to have cracked 100,000 by April 29.

The legacy of this swim will be in whether it enacts any real change politically but, for Ridler, there will be moments that will never leave him.

“It was really hard, but there were plenty of highlights,” Ridler says, a smile creeping across his face, a reflex of those extraordinary memories impossible to replicate or truly explain to those who have never experienced them.

“Being able to have some really unique experiences, being able to see all of New Zealand’s east coast and just the spectacular diversity of the coast,” he adds.

“When you’re in the ocean and the sun is coming up … that was very, very special, the connection with that environment.

“Having some just unreal wildlife experiences … We came across these pods of hundreds of dolphins in the last few weeks in a particular part of the coast, and it’s quite incredible.

“You can hear them well before you can see them — about 10 minutes before they arrive I’m hearing them in the water, there’s chatter under the water.

“And as they come closer, it’s so loud that you can hear the chatter above the water and then they eventually come and they’re swimming all around me with this huge energy. It’s just an incredible, incredible experience.”

Ridler has not given thought to what he would like to do next, wary of jumping into something too quickly after such an ordeal.

For a start, he has a day job to go back to, a wife and a two-year-old daughter to spend time with.

But although it is not something that sits comfortably with him, there is no doubt that he has been, in completing this incredible feat, an inspiration to many.

“I can’t say it’s something that I’m completely comfortable with, the idea that people are inspired by it,” Ridler says.

“But I can definitely understand it.”

‘We’ve done it’: The surprising moment Live Ocean realised they’d achieved their goal

Tuke noted the impact on the New Zealand public as his biggest takeaway from the experience, their biggest advocacy campaign to date.

“It was incredibly special to be part of,” Tuke says of the arrival into Wellington.

“You hope that that’s what it would do. But [from] hoping or thinking that might be the case, to actually seeing it and feeling it on Saturday was — it was unbelievable.

“It was honestly one of the greatest highlights I’ve ever had in my life where I just, I struggled to keep it together for the majority of the day, to be honest.

“I just was looking around and I was trying to grasp why I was feeling quite like that because, obviously I’ve been at the top end of sport and I’ve never quite felt like that.

“But I think here the difference was it’s we came up with the idea, right, and we — you have to believe in the vision of what it could do.

“There’s a lot of people doubting us at the time. And it’s quite a big mission to pull off … and I’d really gone out on a limb to make it happen, so when Jono swam in, it was like, I’ve done this.”

Part of the remit of Live Ocean is for people to respect the relationship between communities and the sea, an age-old relationship that will continue for generations to come.

Tuke and Ridler both noted that meeting with communities along the coast were significant highlights as well.

Te Araroa, a remote town in the Gisborne region of the East Cape that was badly affected by catastrophic flooding in January, was particularly welcoming and affecting for Tuke.

“The team had actually been remote, so they hadn’t even been with their land support,” Tuke said.

“They’d taken the amphibious boat in and camped on two beaches by themselves over three nights.

“And then they came into this next beach, in super remote New Zealand, and there was, I think, 20 kids at the beach.

“They did a Haka for him, they sang Waiata [traditional Māori cultural songs] and, at that moment, it was everything.

“I wanted the mission to get to Wellington and to have the numbers on the petition to take to our decision-makers, but the other, arguably higher for me, was to connect with coastal people and with everyday Kiwis.

“That moment for me was like, we’ve done it. We’re only halfway through the mission, but what this represents is connecting with people.”