Jono Ridler has spent most of his waking moments in 2026 swimming as he completed a 90-day effort down the North Island’s east coast. He speaks to Christopher Reive about his journey.
Jono Ridler’s immersion was stark and sudden.
Looking at a double bed in the back of a campervan as he arrived at Waikuku Beach near North Cape in early January, the reality of his decision hit home.
For the next three months, that was to be his accommodation as he attempted to swim the entire length of the North Island’s east coast.
Almost 1400km.
About 1.4 million strokes over 468 hours.
He set out on January 5 – it was a journey that did not get off to a great start.
“I had a visit from a great white shark and then ended up dealing with some quite bad nausea out on the water. We ended up cutting that day short,” Ridler recalls to the Herald.
“There were huge emotions on that day for sure. Things like, ‘this is a massive mission. Are we up to this? Can we really do this?’
“Of course, it’s natural to have some doubts. Even though my overriding feeling was one of confidence, those thoughts kind of gnaw away at you.”
It was a version of himself that, having now spent the majority of his waking moments this year swimming, he feels is a completely different person from the man who arrived in Wellington in early April.
The double bed in the back of the campervan became the norm for the 36-year-old on his journey, which, working with Blair Tuke and Peter Burling’s conservation charity Live Ocean, Ridler used as a way to bring attention to the commercial fishing practice of bottom trawling.
A petition calling on the New Zealand Government to end bottom trawling on all seamounts – at home and in the high seas by the end of 2027 – and work to transition away from the practice entirely, was launched in conjunction with Ridler’s effort. While the aim was to get 50,000 signatures, the petition has more than 84,000, with a formal petition presentation to Parliament scheduled for April 29.
Toward the end of his swim, Ridler and his team were made aware of social media threats towards his mission, something Ridler says he expected.
“I think it’s important to say that this hasn’t been an anti-commercial fishing campaign. It’s opposed to unsustainable commercial fishing and focused in on fishing methods as opposed to commercial fishermen,” Ridler says.
“I was less conscious about my personal safety and more conscious about what it meant for the mission as a whole. I still think about that as well, how we can use this to drive change through central government while facilitating a transition where commercial fishermen do not bear the financial burden. That’s always been our aim.”
Ridler was no stranger to marathon swimming when he set himself the goal of swimming the length of the east coast of the North Island, with swims across Cook Strait, Foveaux Strait and Lake Taupō, and a 33-hour, non-stop effort from Great Barrier Island to Campbell’s Bay in Auckland in 2023 already under his belt.
The swim itself was a world record-setting attempt for the longest staged unassisted swim, meaning Ridler swam in a swimming cap, goggles and togs – no wetsuit – and the adventure was completed in stages, with Ridler often having two multiple-hour swimming blocks each day. After each swim, he and the small team with him would return to the campervan onshore to shower, eat and sleep before returning to the ocean to do it all again.
Embarking on the adventure meant Ridler got to see a side of the country few – if any – have experienced before him.
“I learned a lot about myself and what is possible, what I’m capable of physically, mentally, emotionally. I learned a lot about the ocean as well through the connection that I was able to have every single day,” he reflects.
“Spending up to 11 hours a day in the ocean, you do develop a pretty strong connection with it and being able to see, touch, feel the marine life around us. All of those experiences, those are things that most people will never see, most people will never experience, and I’ve just been blessed to have so many of those.”
Just some of those experiences include his interactions with marine life.
Ridler swam with dolphins, saw sharks, seals, seabirds, plenty of school fish and work-ups while in the water. He also saw a whale in the Far North and a marlin while swimming in the Bay of Plenty.
“It was definitely variable. There were parts, and it was kind of expected, where I saw less, and that was areas where you do see more commercial fishing pressure, and you do see more population pressure.”
That’s not to say the entire journey was in crystal-clear waters.
There were times when Ridler had to contend with dirt in the water after storms, which affected visibility.
“Sometimes I’d be swimming in places around there where there was quite a lot of active current, and you had the sediment as well, and I couldn’t see past my hand because of it. It was like that swimming around East Cape and that was quite terrifying, actually, in a very sharky area.”
This journey was a test in every sense of the word for the Aucklander.
At times in the last quarter of his journey, Ridler was dealing with jellyfish stings and dropping ocean temperatures, which served up different challenges.
He had more jellyfish sightings earlier in the swim, but the emergence of barbed wire jellyfish, also known as string jellyfish, resulted in him being stung plenty of times. Barbed wire jellyfish are not what would normally come to mind when someone mentions jellyfish. Rather, they are essentially a string made up of several stingers.
While the stings were an annoyance in the water, it was once he was out of the water that they became more of an issue, as they affected his rest.
“It hurts while you’re in the water; that sensation probably lasts maybe 30 minutes or so, and then it starts to die off. But then what follows when coming out of the water is that they get quite itchy,” he explains.
“I would wake up in the middle of the night itching all over my arms because I’d have these bumps all over my arms; just clawing at my arms because of the itch that was on there. The annoyance wasn’t necessarily just the sting at the time; it was what came after the sting and the itch that would continue for days afterwards. That was hard to deal with.”
As the water temperatures dropped, Ridler had to mentally prepare himself before jumping into the ocean.
Towards the end, he was swimming in fresh temperatures around 15C, which came with an immediate cooling effect when he immersed himself in the ocean.
He says the cold seas brought with them a rollercoaster of sensations as the body first had a warming response for about 20 minutes of the swim, before the cold set in and over the remaining time – often hours – things were uncomfortable again.
“That initial warming effect dulls off, and then from there you’re just cold. Like, there’s no other way to explain it,” he says.
“I’d get out of the water. I’d feel okay for probably the first 5-10 minutes or so after getting out of the water. We’d use that time to get dried off, get rugged up with a robe, put a couple of wheat bags on to try get heat on my skin and then take down some water. But even with all of that, I’d still end up shivering.
“Then the hardest part would be when immediately we’d go back to one of these landing points and there would be people out on the beach there to say hello and I was shivering away, hypothermic, still coming back to temperature. Sometimes I just didn’t have it in me to be able to engage in the way that I wanted to. After a session, say, like a four-hour session, it could take three hours to come back to temperature.”
The other major physical challenge was the toll it took on his body.
Along the way, Ridler was dealing with the corrosive effects of salt exposure to his mouth and tongue, an inflamed tendon in his wrist, as well as muscle fatigue in his upper body.
“The normal ones that you’d expect; the lats, rotator cuff muscles, rhomboids, traps, neck, chest ... it just became very tight. It was a case of trying to manage that as best as possible before it turned into injury,” he reflects.
“There was a lot that the physios did down the line to help ease some of those things. I started getting some bad muscular pain in my lower back, both the right side and left side, as we approached the final couple of weeks. I’ve still got that a little bit now. I had some tendinopathy in my triceps where it connects in with the elbow. I couldn’t have done a push-up; there was too much pain.
“When I’d get in the water, it would feel sore. I’d warm up, get going, everything would be okay. When I get out of the water, my muscles start cooling down again, that’s when the pain comes back. So, in my mind, it wasn’t ideal, but it was a case of ‘how do we just keep my body at a level where it can keep going?’
“I felt like even after the 90 days, I could have kept on going for much, much longer. I was getting stronger and stronger. It was more mentally that I think I was ready to call an end to it.”
Ridler says he had no doubts he would complete the swim when he set out from North Cape, but there were times when he wondered how he was going to get through certain conditions.
“It was really hard at times, and I questioned, ‘how am I going to be able to get through another two weeks of dealing with hypothermia, dealing with jellyfish, like constant jellyfish stings, dealing with the muscular pain that I have, dealing with the fatigue, like how am I going to do this?’
“But you forget about what’s too far in front of you and just focus in on what’s in front of you in that moment, and that helps to make it smaller. And if you make it smaller, then it’s more doable.”
As he went along his journey, the momentum behind his efforts and the cause began to build.
Once he passed the 1000km mark, Ridler received messages from some high-profile New Zealanders, including All Blacks great Dan Carter, Six60 and two-time UFC flyweight title challenger Kai Kara-France.
He also received a message of support from American surfing great and 11-time world champion Kelly Slater.
Over the course of his 1367km journey, Ridler also felt the backing of the New Zealand public, which culminated in a massive show of support on arrival in Wellington. He estimates thousands of people turned up to Whairepo Lagoon to cheer him home.
Ridler arrived in Wellington 90 days after he set out from North Cape. It was the exact timeline the team had set before the swim began, but he says it was purely a coincidence that he finished bang on that estimation.
Reflecting on the journey as a whole, Ridler says the turnout at the end of the swim was telling.
“The reception at Whairepo Lagoon showed to me that this is something that people really do care about, and people are really engaged in ocean health; that they want to see change,” Ridler says.
“That, for me, what we saw there, the energy that we experienced and the emotion that we saw in a number of people that were there, it’s a symbol of all of that. I’ll remember that very strongly.
“I wouldn’t say that’s the most memorable; it’s always a hard question to answer, but that certainly sticks out as a symbol of everything that we had been working towards. That was what we wanted, really. We wanted to see that this wasn’t just something that we were doing because we thought it was important to us, that it was something that mattered to everybody, and I think we saw that.”
Christopher Reive joined the Herald sports team in 2017, bringing the same versatility to his coverage as he does to his sports viewing habits.