First he hears a faint chatter coming from the ocean depths, then clicks and squeaks as the creatures draw closer. From the murky edges of his goggles they appear, swift and agile, darting within 10cm of his bare outstretched arms and following him for a time, as he swims hundreds of metres off the coast of New Zealand.
Jono Ridler, an ultra-distance swimmer who is 1,254km (779 miles) into his world record attempt for the longest-ever unassisted staged swim, has learned to hear dolphins more than 15 minutes before they reach him and long before his support boats can see them.
It is the type of knowledge of another species one can only achieve through spending hundreds of hours in their habitat. Ridler says he can now tell a small pod from a super pod at distance and can sense when they are about to reveal themselves.
“Then they are just rushing beneath me, huge amounts of energy,” says the 36-year-old as he takes a break on the Wairarapa coast, three hours drive north of Wellington.
“You can really sense their intelligence when you’re in the water with them … there is a lot of value and connection that we can draw from the ocean.”
That connection, and Ridler’s desire to raise awareness about the threats facing the ocean, has driven him to attempt this unprecedented feat of the longest-ever unassisted staged swim.
An “unassisted” swim means he must only wear swimming shorts, a cap and goggles, and “staged” means he takes breaks on land but returns to swim from where he left off. Two assist boats follow him, providing food and water, and tracking his progress.
Ridler began his roughly 1,350km Swim4TheOcean campaign at the northern tip of New Zealand’s North Island on 5 January and aims to swim the length of the east coast.
Depending on the conditions, he swims two six-hour stints a day, five days in a row before taking a rest day. He has clocked 428 hours in the water and swum the equivalent of 49 Cook Strait crossings, or39 English Channel crossings.
Ridler has battled swarms of stinging jellyfish, sunburn, salt tongue, fatigue and hypothermia. He says it is physically gruelling as much as it is isolating and monotonous.
“It can be quite lonely being in your own head for a long period of time – it’s an important thing to try and manage,” he says, adding he has developed meditative coping methods.
“I do a lot of counting and following my breath, creating a pattern with my breathing. It almost becomes kind of musical.”
It is also difficult being away from his wife, Sarah, and two-year-old daughter Georgie, who live in Auckland.
“[Sarah] has made a big personal sacrifice to make it all happen – it wouldn’t be possible without what she is doing,” he says.
Ridler is working with Live Ocean, a marine conservation charity founded by sailors Peter Burling and Blair Tuke. The charity is live-tracking his progress. He swims between 18km and 30km a day. Tuke says the scale of Ridler’s efforts are “hard to fully grasp”.
“He’s just there, stroke after stroke, minute after minute, hour after hour. It’s relentless,” Tuke said.
“But there’s something pretty special about it too. The power of what he’s doing, and the message he’s carrying with him. When you see that in person, it’s pretty hard to put into words,” Tuke said.
It is an astonishingly taxing endeavour to sign oneself up for, but for Ridler, it was decades in the making.
‘Drawing people into the story of the ocean’
Ridler was born and raised in Auckland, where he spent his childhoods swimming, snorkelling and “getting dumped by waves”.
His early experiences with the ocean were formative. When he attempted ocean swimming in his early 20s he “caught the bug” and his distances grew from 5km to 10km marathon swims. In 2019 he swam the Cook Strait, which separates New Zealand’s North and South Islands.
Spending time in the water meant he could observe the changes he was seeing beneath the surface, particularly in the Hauraki Gulf near Auckland. In 2023, he became the first person to swim the 99km from Aotea/Great Barrier Island to Auckland, to raise awareness about the state of the gulf, which has suffered species decline from pollution, sediment buildup and overfishing.
“There was this passion for the ocean and desire to want to create change – and feeling a tugging in me to do that – that’s really how this current adventure has come about,” Ridler says.
“It’s drawing people into the story of the ocean and getting people to really care about the ocean in a new way.”
His swim comes with a specific call to action – a petition to ban bottom trawling, in which heavy nets are dragged along the seabed. “These very fragile ecosystems can take a very long time to grow and if they are wiped through a trawl, it could take centuries for them to recover. It is devastating to see the damage caused for short-term return.”
Ridler’s efforts have caught attention – the petition has more than 40,000 signatures, with numbers growing daily. He also managed to secure himself a spot in New Zealand’s fish of the year competition (he came fifth, losing out to a little-known Northland mudfish).
In late April, Ridler intends to deliver the petition to parliament in Wellington. But he will need to make the final arduous 111km swim first.
“This is going to be the hardest part – the water temperature is dropping every day as we go further south, the conditions get more exposed and the weather is unsettled,” Ridler says.
“But it’s doable. It’s very doable. And in the next week, we can have it all wrapped up.”