Voices calling out from the dinghy pulled me back to the present from my daydream. To swim for eight hours a day it’s important that I disconnect my mind from my body, so I carefully plan memories to relive while I’m in the water. Suddenly, I became aware of the currents rushing over my skin, the tightness of my goggles and the salt water in my mouth. I stopped swimming to look in the direction my support team were pointing, just in time to see a spout in the distance. I jumped into the dinghy and we sped off to see if we could predict the whales’ path through the Pacific. Guessing correctly, I jumped into the water and a pod of sperm whales soared towards us. It was surreal. One flipped on his back as he passed, gliding along around 10 metres away, meeting my gaze before diving into the deep. It’s an incredible thing to make eye contact with a whale – you can sense that they have feelings, that there is a great brain behind that eye. At the end of that amazing day, I finished my swimming and clambered back onto the support yacht, Discoverer. The crew told me that in the same area as we’d swum with sperm whales, we had broken our record of the number of microplastics collected in half an hour. “We’ve found the highest concentration,” Drew Mcwhirter, our on-board lead scientist, told me. “There were over 3,000 pieces today.”  

This experience took place well into our 79-day stint in the Pacific. I’d heard of the Great Pacific Garbage patch more than 10 years before heading out to see it for myself. Far from the often-depicted floating island of trash, the reality is much more sinister. We called this expedition The Vortex Swim, because that’s what this area is – a swirling vortex of micro plastics and marine debris. I wanted to highlight the issue at a scientific level, to create a discussion based on fact and figures rather than just being perceived as a ‘tree hugger’, so it was important that we had a scientist and photographers on board to help us collect data correctly, visualise what we found and to tell the story in the right way. So, on June 14th, we set off for California from Hawaii to swim 300 nautical miles – representing the 300 million tonnes of plastic being produced every day – through the Pacific gyre.

My father taught me how to swim in the ocean off the southwest of France. I remember how he held me at the surface of the water, his hands supporting my belly as he lifted me up and over each wave. Once, a huge wave came and pushed us both back onto the beach. Of course, I didn’t like being tumbled underwater or getting sand in my mouth, but my father just said: “It’s ok, no big deal. Come back in the water.” That has always stuck with me. He died at 49 from cancer when I was in my early 20s, and so swimming became a way to express myself and to communicate a subject that’s important to me to the rest of the world. The inspiration came from Gérard d’Aboville, who rowed across the Atlantic and then the Pacific. I was a teenager when he did that, but I thought: “Well, if a person can row across an ocean in a small boat and carry everything that he needs, maybe somebody can swim across an ocean with the right logistics.”

It wasn’t until 15 years later that I did my first big swim. It was to raise awareness and funds for a cancer research charity – I swam across the Atlantic. Swimming is a way for me to source myself, to connect with the ocean. That gives me a strong connection with my father, so I want to preserve what my experience of the ocean has been for my children. I have been swimming for many years and I’ve seen the evolution of plastic in our seas and on our beaches. I saw nothing in the water when I was a child, but now when I go to the beach with my kids, we see so much debris. The ocean is an area that should be pristine and safe from the impact of human life. I think the ocean might have been the last place on Earth that looked the same 100 years ago as it did many thousands of years ago. A lot of changes are happening. I want my kids to have the chance to have that same connection with the ocean. What if their children can only know what a sperm whale is by looking at old books or videos?