Remember Jeff’s Strait crossing
This year Napier man Jeff Reid came agonisingly close to earning the record for the longest period of time between two Cook Strait swim crossings.
Having successfully completed the 26km challenging swim in 1987 as a 14-yearold, Reid had another go this year aged 50. Frustratingly, Reid’s powerful May 6 swim was scuppered just 800m from the finish when his support crew decided weather and sea conditions made it too dangerous to continue. Reid’s successful crossing 36 years ago couldn’t have been more different.
He first swam Cook Strait as a 14-year-old, in 1987, a goal he set one winter while swimming with the Napier Aquahawks.
“I wasn’t a very fast swimmer so I thought an easy goal could be to say I want to swim Cook Strait!”
His ambition wasn’t misplaced. Back then the club boasted coaches and club memberswho had themselves done it. His swim coach John Coutts (crossings in 1977 and 1978); well-known swimming identity and friend of the club Pat Benson (1979); and older club member Wayne Jack (who did it in 1982 when he, too, was 14).
“There was a background of people who had done it, so it normalised it for me.”
With the somewhat impromptu decision made, Reid then casually started “getting ready”, preparations that did not include gym workouts, cold water acclimatisation, balance work, or mental visualisation — activities that might be added to a training plan today. Instead, when summer 1987 rolled around, Reid simply increased the number of lengths he swam in Onekawa’s outside pool. “It was all very basic,” he remembers.
A few weeks later someone told him that if he was serious, he’d better do a decent open water swim, “so I did.”
Reid and teen swimming friend Katrina Egan (who went on to be a world surf ski champion) knocked out a five-hour swim between Tangoio and Ahuriri. Accompanied by friends in kayaks (one missing a bung) and cans of Complan “we swam across the bay — it was all pretty spacey stuff!”.
Now a highly regarded Gold Coast surf lifesaving coach, Egan remembers getting the night-before call-up, and, being 16 and super fit, she agreed to the mad plan. She says her patience was tested during the escapade as the then 13-yearold Reid was insanely talkative, groused a lot, and wanted to practice his food stops. “It was about 16km and I recall getting frustrated and cold!”
After chalking up the long swim Reid’s supportive parents Ray and Mary took their boy to see the pilot who would navigate him across the Strait.
They’d been asked to show how their son swamand Reid’s 20 minutes of freestyle off Plimmerton Beach was all Shalimar pilot Graham Wilkinson needed to see. The swim was on.
Two early swim windows closed because of subsequent bad weather and tides but finally, on March 23, 1987, the crossing got under way.
The relaxed lead-up to the campaign meant Reid got two early surprises on the day of his swim. The first was when he learned that, because of the tides and currents, he would swim the Strait south-to-north, requiring a long bumpy boat trip to the South Island before