A 17-year-old girl recently swam across the Cook Strait (New Zealand), spending 14 hours in the water to cover around forty kilometres. During her performance, she was continually attacked by jellyfish, of which she has a phobia. Thousands of stings were visible on her body.
She paid dearly for her feat. Maya Merhige, a 17-year-old American teenager, recently swam alone across the Cook Strait, which separates New Zealand’s North and South Islands. During her athletic performance, the swimmer was attacked by jellyfish and ended up with her body covered in painful stings, reports CNN Sports , Wednesday 30 April 2025.
Maya Merhige is aiming to become the youngest person in the world to complete the Oceans Seven, a sporting challenge that involves crossing seven inlets of rough water. Even before graduating, she had already crossed the Moloka’i Channel (Hawaii), the Catalina Channel off Los Angeles (USA) and the English Channel between France and England. Now all she has to do is cross the North Sea, the Straits of Gibraltar and the Tsugaru Strait (Japan).
The Cook Strait is 22 km wide, but because of the rough seas and strong currents, the teenager veered off course several times. As a result, instead of crossing in a straight line in seven hours, she spent 14 hours in the water and swam a total distance of more than 43 km. And that’s without taking into account the jellyfish, which the young girl is scared to death of. When I got into the water, I was already terrified of seeing them,” she told CNN. Throughout the crossing, I had to fight to overcome this fear. Despite swimming at night, the sportswoman couldn’t really ignore the jellyfish, which attacked her without stopping: “I was stung continuously, 25 times a minute, over and over again.
As a result, she was left with thousands of burning punctures all over her body at the end of this gruelling challenge. Even her face, nose, lips and ears were attacked. But that’s not enough to discourage the young girl, who really wants to beat this record. What’s more, the sportswoman is using her exploits to raise awareness of a cause close to her heart: paediatric cancer. In the course of her aquatic marathons, she has already raised over 130,000 dollars for the cause.
