ABOVE: "Adventure brings people together," says Epic Swim Maui founder Robby Seeger. "And there was definitely no shortage of it during this expedition, swimming off sections of Maui where maybe no one's ever swam."
Off the remote southeast coastline of Maui, about an hour out of Kihei, our little boat ramps off an open ocean swell, lofted by forty-knot winds. I hold onto the cabin's roof and brace for impact.
"Slow it down a little more, Bozo!" hollers Robby Seeger, founder of Epic Swim Maui. "We can't break all this camera gear on the last day!" We're in an escort boat struggling alongside some of the world's most renowned open-ocean endurance swimmers on the last leg of the first circumnavigation of a Hawaiian Island. The ten remaining swimmers are about to close the 134-mile loop around Maui, tackled in thirteen segments over the past three weeks.
I am certainly under no illusions about the challenges of open-ocean endurance, a.k.a. ultramarathon swimming, but with swells this big and winds fraying the deep blue sea to denim, all I can think is, "They're swimming in this?"
That, and, "Is our captain's name really 'Bozo?'"
Seeger hangs onto the cabin and stares at the ocean, frowning. We're nearly at the finish line of an event he's been planning for years, and the conditions couldn't be worse. The swimmers tried to finish yesterday, crawling nearly six straight hours for more than eleven miles, from Puuiki to Kaupo, before they were pulled from the water when a tiger shark arrived to scope them out.
"It's like we're pushing a mower through a cane field!" Seeger yells over the roar of the twin outboard motors and gale-force winds. I hear a hint of his German accent, the nation of his youth, before he moved to Maui at 17 and became a two-time world champion windsurfer and big-wave surfer.
A dentist in Egypt and the only endurance swimmer in his nation, Epic Swim Maui participant Mostafa Zaki swam across the Red Sea in 2022 to spotlight the effects of climate change on coral reefs.
Epic Swim participants celebrate the completion of their circumnavigation of Maui: 134 miles over the course of thirteen days within a period of three weeks.
Seeger explains over the roar of the engines that this "expedition swim" (his term) is not only the first of its kind anywhere on Earth but also a UNESCO Ocean Decade-sanctioned event that blends endurance swimming with ocean science. Epic Swim Maui describes itself as "a call to action for ocean health," which they heed by conducting research off this very boat to collaborating with Native Hawaiian elders to community activations ... there's a lot happening around it. Calling it an "expedition" is apt: The swimmers are boldly stroking where (probably) no one has stroked before. And like many expeditions, Epic Swim delves into the unknown, with all its danger and uncertainty.
After negotiating the barrage of swells, we arrive in the waters off Kaupo, where I glimpse the remaining ten swimmers stroking nearly in unison downcurrent, escorted by the world's foremost big-wave safety specialists riding jet skis—watermen like Archie Kalepa, Mark Pukini and Kurtis Chong Kee—who guide the swimmers away from exposed reef and cranky currents. A speargun-wielding Sam Young cruises beneath the swimmers, propelled by military-issue underwater "jet boots" and scanning for apex predators and keeping tabs on unruly currents and eddies.
While the swimmers appear to be in a Zen-like state of slow-mo focus, some of them a mere two feet behind the other, drafting like race car drivers in the lead swimmer's wake, the water safety team is getting lickings, the relentless winds whipping their rescue sleds up onto their backs and heads, "rat-trapping" them as the expression goes.
Captain Bozo slows us down to a near idle while Seeger focuses a RED camera on the group. His partners and Epic Swim co-founders and filmmakers Stefan Schaefer and Rudy Castorina are getting footage for a documentary series about the event, and Seeger knows an added angle always helps. Waves crash cinematically onto cliffs twenty feet from the swimmers, sending spray over their backs, the mist creating rainbows in the mid-morning light. An iwa (frigate bird) soars over the pod. Beyond, Haleakala reaches into the sky, half-hidden in the clouds.
Staring into the viewfinder, Seeger shakes his head and exclaims, "C'mon ... tell me this isn't sexy!"
"What was super funny to all of us on the water safety team is that those gnarly, windy days that were the most challenging for us—those were the swimmers' favorite days," laughs Mark Pokini, a water safety specialist who accompanied Epic Swim Maui. "I've never seen people swim like that together in sync. It was a thing to behold."
Astonishing as the feats of endurance swimmers are, they are mostly unknown by the non-swimming world. In April 2007 a 52-year-old Slovenian man named Martin Strel completed an astounding 66-day, 3,273-mile journey by swimming the length of the Amazon. Strel had previously swum the length of the Mississippi, Danube and Yangtze rivers, among others. Ever heard of him? Most haven't.
Watching the obscure documentary film about Strel's swim of the Amazon, Big River Man, Seeger became fascinated by endurance swimmers. It was a pivotal time in Seeger's life, years after his big-wave exploits at Jaws—followed by more at Nazare, Portugal, in the mid-2000s—and he was looking for a new adventure. He wondered if it'd be possible to swim around the island of Maui. Seeger felt it'd be a feat that Native Hawaiian swimming legend and father of modern-day surfing Duke Kahanamoku would be proud of, which is why "In Honour of Duke Kahanamoku the Original Waterman" is technically part of Epic Swim Maui's full name.
"What we do," says Ryan Leong, "it will never not be fringe," A former triathlete turned endurance swimmer from Kailua, Oahu, Leong is one of the leading athletes in Epic Swim Maui. "It's tough to identify with open-ocean endurance athletes. A lot of that comes down to having the support necessary for these types of swims. But I do it because I love being in the ocean. From sharks and bottlenose dolphins to eagle rays and monk seals, you never know what you're gonna see out there. It's never boring for me. But for someone watching, it's probably a little like watching paint dry."
He's not wrong. It's slow. Grueling. It's only the crawl, and, I note, they don't kick but keep their legs stationary and buoyant, like a rudder, to conserve energy. With ultramarathon swimming, you're not trying to get there fast; you're just trying to get there.
"Some sections were incredibly challenging," says Croatian swimmer Dina Levacic, who holds the world record as the youngest woman ever to complete the Oceans Seven challenge. "But endurance swimming—the challenge is probably 90 percent mental. You have to be mentally tough."
And much as Seeger finds it sexy, endurance swimming will never have the mass appeal of other high-octane ocean sports like surfing. It's just a different type of human who's willing to swim for eight hours at a time, usually alone, one deliberate stroke at a time. Many of these swims, like the channel crossings of the Oceans Seven, a premier ultramarathon swimming challenge consisting of seven open-water channel swims around the world (the swimming equivalent of the Seven Summits mountaineering challenge), begin in the pitch black of night. Swimmers don't get back on the boat to eat or drink but remain in the water for "feedings," where the support team will toss them water, energy gels, fruit or hydration packs that can be consumed in the water. The Epic Swim support team conducted these feedings every forty-five minutes for all thirteen swim days of the expedition.
Thus, when the swimmers round the headland into the calm, translucent waters of Nuu Landing, three weeks and 134 miles after hopping into the seas off Hana, there is no fanfare or news crews clamoring for interviews, no choppers above nor even many cheering bystanders on land. In the van on our way back to Wailea, where the swimmers are staying, the youngest member of the expedition, John "Kalei" Clark, a great-grandnephew of Duke Kahanamoku, shows me the response from a friend he's just texted about completing a swim around Maui: Liar.
Regardless of whether anyone is paying attention, these are extraordinary athletes. Only thirty-two swimmers have completed the Oceans Seven, and five of them joined Epic Swim. One of them, Andy Donaldson, has multiple world records, two for completing all seven channel crossings in under a year—and faster than anyone before him. Sarah Ferguson swam around Rapa Nui (Easter Island) nonstop for over nineteen hours and has crawled along a decent portion of the South African coastline. Yvette Teteh swam the length of the 450-kilometer Volta River in Ghana. Mustafa Zaki swam across the Red Sea. Barbara Hernandez Huerta holds a world record for swimming distances in minus two degrees Celsius waters off Antarctica. Sarah Thomas is the first person to complete a four-lap crossing of the English Channel, fifty-four hours and ten minutes of nonstop swimming—a year after surviving triple-negative breast cancer.
These aren't just different athletes, they are different humans.
"The human potential is even greater than I thought," says local waterman Sam Young, pictured escorting the swimmers wearing military-issue "jet boots" around his waist. "When they swam from Nuu Landing to La Perouse—that completely blew my mind. I just couldn't believe a human could swim that in one go. The currents, how rough it was—it was inspiring and incredible to witness."
"I'm not chasing accomplishments," Leong says. "I'm looking for experiences." We're talking after the finale on the sun-parched earth at Nuu while I mingle with the very elated and very relieved swimmers cracking beers and downing the flutes of champagne. Leong, like many of these swimmers, sports a reverse raccoon's mask suntan from his swim goggles. "More mainstream sports like Ironman and marathon running ... it's a sticker on a car. This, however—it's hard to repeat anything in the ocean because it's always changing. So, even if you're the fastest person from here to there, the ocean currents and conditions might not care about that. Some goal-oriented people can't handle the ocean's unknown factor.'"
On the eleventh day of swimming, for example, not long after hanging a right out of Hana, conditions nearly broke the strongest of the pod. Winds whipped and swells rebounded off the sea cliffs, the backwash continually breaking their formation and disorienting the swimmers. Donaldson, the main pacesetter among the athletes, became nauseated and dizzy. They found themselves caught in a relentless current, and after nearly an hour realized they'd barely gone a kilometer.
"That ... was demoralizing," says Dina Levacic, shaking her head as if to rid it of the memory. The Croatian holds the record as the youngest woman ever to complete the Oceans Seven challenge. The others around her groan at the flashback. "You could see a certain rock beneath us while we were swimming, and it was like, 'Why can't we pass this rock!?'"
"Your mind can go to some pretty dark places sometimes if you let it, and endurance swimming is mostly mental," adds Stefan Reinke, an attorney from Oahu and the eldest of the Epic swimmers at 63. Inducted into Hawaii's Swimming Hall of Fame in 2021, Reinke has completed fifteen channel crossings in the Islands.
"Open-ocean swimming is one of those few places where you can be alone with your thoughts," says Scottish swimmer Andy Donaldson, seen here setting the pace off Maui. "There's no phone, no music—you're fully immersed in the ocean, often in a meditative flow state. And you stay there as long as you can until you reach point B."
"When your mind starts to wander, it's like you're trapped in a cage out in the ocean and you can't escape it," laughs Donaldson. "And it happens. I once swam from Ireland to Scotland—about twenty miles—and all I could think was, 'I'm so bloody cold.' Nothing was working. But ... you have a big safety team and support, and what I learned then is that you can't do it alone. The mind will always give out before the body."
One of the swimmers, young Marion Joffle of France, an indomitable "ice-swimmer" who's done races in one-degree Celsius waters off Antarctica and in the Arctic, was sunburned so badly the first day of the expedition that she had to sit out a few sections until her blistered first-degree burns healed some.
Others got their first, painful temporary tattoos courtesy of Hawaii's ubiquitous, stinging Portuguese man-of-war, a bit of a rite of passage for beachgoers on the eastern shores of all Hawaiian Islands, really.
Of the fifteen swimmers who started Epic Swim (some of whom dropped in and out of the expedition throughout the three weeks due to scheduling), four swimmers—Donaldson, Leong, Clark and Reinke—completed every segment in its entirety.
"A huge driving factor for me coming on this expedition was that science and sport came together," says South African endurance swimmer Sarah Ferguson, who advocates for the reduction of single-use plastics. Part of Epic Swim involved data collection for science projects aimed at protecting the oceans. "Hopefully, what's learned about microplastics through this event can educate and create policy change," she says.
Standing among these men and women from six different continents, all of them slathered in reef-safe zinc oxide to protect their backs from countless hours of sun exposure, I wonder, Why torture yourself?
Beyond their shared love for swimming, they each have a cause for which their swims raise awareness and funds. Donaldson swims for mental health, an issue he dealt with personally when he didn't make the Olympics, which he'd always thought was his life's purpose. Teteh swims to end child labor and advocates against the destructive impact of fast fashion in the textile industry. Ferguson swims to end single-use plastics. Levacic swims for children with developmental disabilities. Hernandez swims through melting icebergs to raise awareness of climate change. Clark swims to end resident drowning in the Islands, which claims an unnecessarily high number of children's lives in Hawaii.
What makes Epic Swim Maui different from these causes is that the athletes are doing it as a group. This expedition is the first time a group of ultramarathon swimmers have teamed up for the cause of ocean health, a huge problem to tackle but, like long-distance swims, accomplished by degrees. "You don't just get from here to Molokai overnight," says Ferguson. "You get there one stroke at a time. You also can't eliminate single-use plastic in one night. But it's like, every time you reuse a water bottle and fill it up, or take your own coffee cup, you're cumulatively facilitating a change. A huge driving factor for me being involved in this is the idea of science and sport coming together to create policy change and educate producers and consumers. That's a lot more valuable to the world than setting records."
"Really, swimming is just the blunt object for all this," Leong adds. "It's using sport to bring interest and people in, but then it's merely the platform for the science and cultural aspects we explore to help raise awareness for ocean health."
Scientists and their teams from Europe, North America and the University of Hawaii followed the swimmers on boats, taking samples and conducting citizen science projects all over the island. The turtle's pace of swimming afforded the researchers more time at sea, and at various sites where the swimmers camped, scientists spoke with local fishermen and community elders.
Dimitri Deheyn, research scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, studies microplastics, microfibers and how their proliferation affects us. The swimmers collected and filtered water samples for his study on microfibers found in the ocean and air. "Unfortunately, microplastics unite us," Deheyn laments. "This is a global contaminant. Countries can't really point the finger at each other because it's now everywhere, so showing that wherever we were in Maui we found them—it's a crazy, but important truth."
John Starmer, chief scientist for the Maui Nui Marine Resource Council, was on a boat following the swimmers to test water quality. Starmer had the swimmers wear miniature sensors to measure salinity levels in order to study how variations impact marine life and ecosystem health. Torsten Fischer of Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon in Germany joined the global PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or "forever chemicals") study, with the swimmers and crew collecting water samples around Maui. It was the first time Hereon team sampled Pacific waters. "This is the way science should be. Not science for science's sake, but science for the people," says Fischer. "The Hawaiian people know much more about their own waters than we do right? So to speak with local fishermen and people who live on the water, that's such a great source of information. It was great to realize our common goal, which is to keep these waters clean."
"After the fires on Maui, people from the community started to ask about the water. Is it safe, can we swim, can we eat the fish?" says Andrea Kealoha, a Maui native and assistant professor of oceanography at UH Manoa. Kealoha conducted water quality studies around Lahaina following the wildfires of 2023, investigating the impact on local water systems, assessing changes in water quality and identifying contaminants.
Epic Swim Maui connected Kealoha with Helmholtz-Zentrum Hereon and Sea & Sun Technology, which loaned the scientists half a million dollars' worth of high-precision sensors reprogrammed for stationary deployment along the Lahaina coastline and trained Epic Swim staff to support their deployment.
I put it to Kealoha bluntly and ask why this matters—what, if anything, a group of athletes swimming around the island could do to help save it. "I think that the collaboration with Epic Swim Maui allowed for these types of international relationships to develop," she says, "so we could comprehensively understand the water quality along coastal Maui after the Lahaina wildfires. We brought together scientists, athletes, the community, industry partners, government, nonprofits. ... You don't see science being done that way, and it's a beautiful thing. The more we bring in resources and experts from other places to help us learn about our waters, the better it will perpetuate our culture and the longevity of our communities."
On a clear summer morning drifting out of Maalaea Harbor, I find myself on a boat again, but this time on windless, calm seas in a much larger craft normally reserved for whale-watching tours. Friends, family, remaining scientists and local community members involved in Epic Swim have been invited onto the catamaran to follow and celebrate the swimmers as they do a victory lap around Molokini Crater a couple of miles offshore. Despite the 134 miles they'd done this month, they figure they have another five or so left in the tank.
Beside me the inimitable Anake Vicky Kaluna-Palafox, or Auntie Vicky to most, allows me into her orbit. A cultural adviser to Epic Swim Maui from Ukumehame by way of Molokai, Auntie Vicky is a warm soul and comic genius. She's likely to break out with spontaneous oli (chants), songs that seem to bubble up from somewhere beyond, the kind of chants that make time pause and listen.
She holds a Starbucks cup and notices me peering at it longingly. "Hot-grande-sugah-free-vanilla-oat-milk-latte," she rattles off. "Every time, boy." Her husband quietly peels a ceremonial ti leaf beside her.
At various stops along the way, the group of swimmers—and the scientists following them—met with kupuna (elders) like Auntie Vicky and other Native Hawaiian figures and advisers within Maui's twelve different moku (traditional Hawaiian districts), discussing the state of the ocean and coastline off their respective shores, with a healthy dose of Hawaiian history and cultural exchange in the mix.
I ask Auntie Vicky what she thinks about the whole event. She takes a sip, closes her eyes and leans back for emphasis. "What Epic Swim brings is consciousness. They bring awareness to issues like trash around our islands, to microplastics we might breathe. In my eyes they came not only to swim in the ocean, but to do good. You know, I had to explain to the others that they're not just coming to swim in the ocean fo' bring tourists. They're here to malama and to care for our oceans.
"I wouldn't be here if I didn't believe they respected our place," she shrugs. "It was a big sacrifice. They gave of themselves so unselfishly. Full focus, full discipline ... so that kine respect we see. Put 'um dis way—if they asked me fo' do 'um again, I would hana hou [repeat] dis in a flash."
Then, without warning, Auntie Vicky rises and walks starboard, chanting in Hawaiian over the bodies of the swimmers approaching the gorgeous crescent-shaped rock poking up from the sea in front of us.
"These guys, they're the unsung heroes," says Seeger, pointing to the pod of men and women in bright swim caps, slowly making their way through the sea. "The basis of all watermanship is being a good swimmer. Duke Kahanamoku knew it and demonstrated that in multiple Olympics and at home. Inspiration or mentor, when you tell a story about Hawaii and the water, there really is no story without him. He's the basis of why every single water sport here has continued to exist, and honoring the Duke really was an extra motivation for these guys."
"You can ride a fifty-foot wave," he says, "but if you're not a strong swimmer, you're not a waterman. And these are the strongest swimmers in the world."
