Thirty-six years after he first did it as a 14-year-old Jeff Reid from Napier is about to attempt swimming Cook Strait. Behind him is the support vessel Tangaroa. Photo / Amy Reid
Thirty-six years after he first did it as a 14-year-old Jeff Reid from Napier is about to attempt swimming Cook Strait. Behind him is the support vessel Tangaroa. Photo / Amy Reid
By Hayley Redpath
By 9.30pm the black sea and night sky are one. The ocean kicks up around the swimmer. He can't see his hands pulling through the water. Vast and silent forces swirl around and just 800m beyond him lies New Zealand's North Island. He left the South Island more than 11 hours ago and the weather is getting nasty . . .
It is Friday May 6, 2022. Autumn in New Zealand. The night-time swimmer is 50-year-old Napier man Jeff Reid and he's trying to cross the treacherous Cook Strait.
Incredibly, Reid has already swum this challenging passage back when he was just 14.
Today, the father of two aims to earn the record for the longest period of time between two crossings.
"I want to see if I can do it again because I don't want my legacy to be that I swam it when I was 14."
Jeff Reid makes his away across the Cook Strait under the ever-watchful eyes of Philip Rush and Corey Fairbairn. Photo / Hayley Redpath
But there's another reason the Napier Port marine team leader wants to swim. A few years ago, he and wife Amy learned that Reid has polycystic kidney disease, which causes the deterioration of kidney function with the eventuality of regular dialysis.
"I don't know how long my body will support the physical strain of the swim and the hours of cold-water training," Reid says. "My undertaking to swim the Strait again is a challenge and a pleasure for myself, my wellbeing, and my sense of fulfilment."
Cook Strait is the narrow gap that separates Aotearoa New Zealand's North Island from the South Island. It's where the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean meet and, at its narrowest point, it is 22km across. Powerful currents push through and, without warning, tidal rips flow one way and then the other. Traversing the Strait in a straight line is impossible and it's expected Reid's swim will be more like 26km long.
The earliest known Cook Strait swim was in the mid-18th century by Māori woman Hinepoupou, of the Ngāti Kuia tribe.
But it was New Zealander Barrie Devenport's 1962 swim that gripped the nation's attention. Devenport became the Sir Edmund Hillary of swimming and since then swimmers from around the world have been lured by the challenge.
After Devenport, Wellington's Philip Rush became New Zealand's master of endurance swimming. Rush is a two-time double Cook Strait crosser and holds the record for the fastest double and triple English Channel crossings.
Now offering his guiding services as part of Cook Strait Swim, Rush says as well as a strong swimmer, a successful crossing requires luck around weather, tides, and temperatures.
"It's not an easy piece of water to get across . . . no two days are the same. That's the nature of the beast and why it's the hardest swim in the world."
Only one in every four of Rush's swimmers makes it across.
Rush is helped by others who will crew two vessels during each swim attempt. Today, skipper Chris McCallum and navigator Joy Griffiths are in the 38-foot support boat Tangaroa, named for the Māori and Polynesian god of the sea.
The pair are responsible for planning and safely executing today's passage, while Rush directs Reid from close proximity in an inflatable rescue boat (IRB) driven by Corey Fairbairn, a firefighter.
Also supporting Reid is his American-born teacher wife, Amy, a sunny-day swimmer who also loves New Zealand's bush life.
Long-time friend Davey Jones – also a long-distance swimmer – is also on board and will swim alongside his friend if Reid needs encouragement or a pacer.
And completing the support team is part-time ocean swimmer and full-time writer Hayley Redpath.
Reid's pairing with Rush is symbolic. In 1987, on the same day, they both swam Cook Strait but the men never met until today.
During the crossing Reid will have to push through two or more tides that move in firstly from his left, then from his right, acting like powerful rivers running at right angles to the direction he needs to go.
Rush says today's sea conditions are the best since Reid began waiting in March for a favourable window. He says swimming is about more than just brute strength.
"It's a matter of getting the weather and tides right."
In the over 20 years he's been guiding, he's had only 150 out of 570 swimmers achieve their goal.
Jeff Reid's 2022 swim coordination team abandon his record-breaking second attempt in the interest of crew and swimmer safety. Reid was just 800m from the coast. Photo / Hayley Redpath
By the time Tangaroa has completed the two-hour crossing from Mana Cruising Club in the North Island to near Cape Koamaru on Arapawa Island (considered part of the South Island), Reid just wants to get in the water.
After a kiss for Amy, he joins Rush and Fairbairn in the IRB and motors the few metres over to the South Island, slips into the water, swims to and touches the cliff rock. It is 10.15am.
When he swam the Strait in 1987 the water temperature was 12C so today's 17C is easy to manage. He ditches his swim cap and settles into a rhythm.
Like all elite open-water swimmers, Reid has a high arm cadence. He turns his arms over 75 times a minute and he'll maintain it all day.
Many people think that swimming power comes from the arms, says Jones, but it's the back that plays the more important role.
"Look at the back on that bugger," he laughs. "Two-thirds of him is body and then he's got these dinky little legs."
The first three hours are blissful for swimmer and onlookers alike. As Reid and the crew enjoy their respective lunches, Amy likens this part of the day to childbirth.
"One person is doing all the work while the other sits on the sideline eating a sandwich yelling 'yay'!"
By now Reid is 8.2km in and just after 2.45pm he makes it to halfway.
The sun warms his back and shoots beams through the water and he's feeling good.
"It was so pleasurable. I had people say you've got to enjoy the process, and I did."
But by 3pm the mood on Tangaroa is darkening. "He'll have to have his headlights on," forewarns McCallum, alluding to a night swim. For the first time today, the team are worried.
A powerful tide means Reid is being pushed strongly to the south. The further he goes, the more the North Island's rugged coastline retreats.
An hour passes. More fix points are taken and by 4.15pm Reid's been swimming for six hours and covered 17.8km, but he's whooshing down the centre of Cook Strait faster than he's moving towards land.
As the sun begins to set, skipper McCallum asks his passengers to tidy the vessel while he transfers torches, navigational lights, and warm clothes to Rush and Fairbairn.
Amy's stomach is churning with nerves but Reid isn't worried. At just 6km from the North Island he switches his tinted goggles for clear ones that have a navigational light. He doesn't even notice the Interislander ferry Valentine as it passes close by.
When he learns he is now 7km from shore he guesses it's the tides that have added the extra kilometre. It doesn't matter, he knows he's got plenty in the tank.
Instead, he's thinking about night swimming, "like wearing a blindfold in the water". Darkness envelopes him, a river of stars appears overhead, and time slips by.
Time isn't as fluid on board Tangaroa. By 7pm the crew are waiting for the slack tide that will give Reid a chance to swim in still waters before it turns him around and pushes him towards the coastline.
With his trajectory south, the North Island's Oteranga Bay is now a possible finishing point. Rugged and rocky, it's where the underground Cook Strait communications cable comes ashore.
There is 4km to go when the slack tide arrives and arrests Reid's southerly slide. From afar, friends and family can see his progress unfold via a GPS tracker app.
They watch as he turns back on himself almost 180 degrees, but there's something they can't see . . . as well as having to cross over the new north-moving tide, he must also swim through worsening weather.
Reid notices the change. When he turns his head to breathe, dark waves smack into his mouth, his throat hurts from the sea water, the swell disrupts his left-arm stroke.
In the rolling Tangaroa, everyone waits anxiously as Reid battles on. He moves his arms powerfully despite the coal-black waves breaking over him. He sometimes struggles to see the IRB. He's only 1km from shore but over the past hour the tide has brought him to a standstill.
McCallum is mindful that, regardless of how this swim ends, there's nearly two hours of motoring required to get back to Mana Cruising Club.
He's a kilometre offshore and so are the swimmer and IRB crew, but they're not getting any closer and the weather is getting worse.
Knowing they're close to land Rush asks Reid for 10 minutes of hard swimming to see if he can get across the river-like tide. Reid responds, reaching down through years of ocean swimming to "really dig it in".
It's not enough. Over the sound of the worsening weather Rush radios from the IRB, and McCallum tells him they are 300m further out from the beach than they were an hour ago. The final radio exchanges between the swim coordinator and the captain play out over two minutes. Their conversation is a mix of deliberation, care, and kindness. The crew is disappointed, McCallum says, "but we need to get home safely, and we need to get home for the swimmer, so he can swim it again if he needs to".
"This guy hasn't got hypothermia. The water temperature is amazing. He's had a 75-80 stroke rate pretty much all the way. He has worked so hard to get there and there is nothing you can do."
It's 9.43pm when he leans over the side of the IRB and tells Reid he's actually slipped backwards: "We've got to pull you."
When Griffiths stops the clock Reid has been swimming for 11 hours, 26 minutes, and 56 seconds, covering 33km. "He's just swum so well," she says quietly.
Sir Edmund Hillary once said of his 1953 Mt Everest summit that he hadn't "conquered" the world's tallest mountain, Everest had merely relented. Today, Cook Strait was unrelenting.
Back home in Napier, Reid is still managing his kidney disease, still passionately swimming for hours every week.
He's overjoyed that on May 6, 2022, he swam farther and longer than ever before, and that his own lack of ability or mental stamina were not the reasons the swim was abandoned.
"As the tides worked against my swimming the sea state deteriorated to the point that safety margins were eroded and it was no longer safe to continue," he says.
"I didn't touch the rocks, but I never gave up."
Reid all about it: Five things you didn't know about Jeff Reid
1) Reid's swimming prowess is all the more incredible as his left arm is permanently bent after it was broken when he was a teen.
2) Despite swimming Cook Strait as a 14-year-old, his school sports prize was that year awarded to someone else.
3) As a surf lifesaver, he has saved a number of people from drowning along Napier's Marine Parade.
