Cyclone Gabrielle: Ocean swimmers go the distance for cyclone-ravaged communities

It might sound like the beginnings of a bad joke but when the cellist, the public servant, the ops team leader and the community health adviser got together it wasn’t in a bar, but in the sea, in the spirit of goodwill.

Rebecca Hollingsworth​, Corrina Connor​, Mike Howard​ and Adriana Milne​ are ultra-distance open water swimmers, who are dedicating their most recent marathon swims to communities battered by Cyclone Gabrielle.

The four friends – members of Wellington’s close-knit, and growing, ocean swimming community – were each looking to tackle an ultra-marathon swim (an open water swim of more than 10km) over the next few weeks.

When the cyclone hit it was decided to use the swims as a fundraiser for families who lost everything to the floods.

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“It was tough seeing people go through that,” said Hollingsworth, a policy analyst with the Social Wellbeing Agency . “Like most New Zealanders we wanted to help out, so this was our way of helping.”

She was first off the blocks, completing the 44 km across Lake Wanaka on Saturday in 14 hours 18 mins, becoming only the second person to do the swim without a wetsuit.

A 10-year open sea veteran Hollingworth’s first ultra swim was Australia’s Rottnest Channel, a six and a half hour 20 km swim through throngs of “stingers”(jellyfish), trying not to think about sharks

Since then, she has swum with dolphins, orca and turtles, completed a four-lake four-day swim challenge in Arizona – blissfully unaware of a rattlesnake accompanying her across Apache Lake – and Cook Strait in 2021. She also did a double-crossing of Lake Taupō last year, which saw her become the fastest female over the 80.4 km course, in 27hrs 48 min.

Mike Howard was also supposed to have been in the water last weekend, but conditions for his planned swim – 40.2 km across Lake Taupō – were less than favourable.

The swim – fingers are crossed for the end of this week – will be his first ultra. The former cyclist took up swimming after suffering three serious concussions over four years, including one instance where he found himself in hospital unable to walk or talk.

Howard is well prepared for Taupō, having swum just over 1100 km during 12 months’ of training.

He can’t wait to get into the water, not only because fewer people have successfully swum Lake Taupō than have swum Cook Strait, but because supporting communities impacted by the cyclone is something he’s already involved in through his job.

“How can you not support your fellow New Zealanders if they are suffering? It would be remiss not to do anything,” he said.

Milne is also attempting Taupō and, like Howard, it’s her first extra long swim. She’s a newbie to ocean swimming, having picked it up just as Covid hit in 2020. Training has included several 10 km races, lengthy pool sets, and a five-and-a-half-hour swim at Oriental Bay “looping around the buoys for hour and hours.”

“It started out as a casual thing through Facebook, but it really quickly became obsessive,” she said.

Seeing the brutal effects of climate change so close to home was an important spur for Milne, an operations’ delivery lead at open software company Catalyst IT.

“It’s everyday people who have been affected by this…it’s very sad, and I just think one day it could be us.”

Connor, a cellist and librarian, has been a competitive swimming since she was at primary school. Depending on tides and wind the 40-year-old hopes to swim Foveaux Strait, from the northern tip of Rakiura/Stewart Island to Bluff, sometime this week.

It wil be Connor’s second ultra swim. Her first was Cook Strait in December 2021, when the combination of a gut-busting training regime – four sessions in the sea and five in the pool each week – and mental perseverance (“counting to 200 over and over again and thinking about food”) saw her complete the crossing in a respectable 9hrs 15 min.

While Connor doesn’t know anyone in the worst-hit areas of Hawke’s Bay or Gisborne she knows people in Auckland who had their lives disrupted by the cyclone.

“Because I spend so much time in the water, I have an understanding of the power of it. It can be frightening. Seeing peoples’ homes destroyed by the power of water was very moving. I can’t imagine how terrifying that must have been. To lose your house like that feels unimaginable.”

The quartet is coached by legendary open water swimmer Philip Rush.​ Rush was the first person to do the double crossing of both Cook Strait and Lake Taupō and holds the world record for the fastest two and three-way swim of the English Channel.

The swims can be tracked on the Wellington Ocean Swimmers Facebook page.