Caitlin knocks another bastard off

Auckland marathon swimmer Caitlin O’Reilly has created history by becoming the world’s youngest person to complete seven big channel swims, known as the Oceans Seven.
O’Reilly, 20, completed her final swim, the 42.5km Moloka’i Channel in Hawaii, late last week. It’s known for its wind, waves and sea life.
Few complete it in less than 14 hours; O’Reilly did it in 13 hours and 17 minutes but said it was the toughest of the swims she’s completed. 
She headed off from South Pāpōhaku Beach on Molokai’i Island at 5.40pm on Wednesday, arriving at Oahu’s Alan Davis Beach early Thursday morning. 
This was O’Reilly’s third attempt to complete the gruelling channel in a year to finally complete all seven swims, seven years after she completed her first one across Cook Strait, aged 12.
“It’s super special, it’s been in the works for seven years.” O’Reilly told LockerRoom from Hawaii after the swim.
“It’s all kind of sinking in, it’s relief as well, but I’m pretty knackered, pretty beat up.”
The youngest female to do all seven swims was previously aged 27; the youngest male to do so is 23. Just 34 have completed all seven. O’Reilly is the ninth woman to do so, and the second from New Zealand after Kimberley Chambers in 2014.
While those swimming the Moloka’i Channel must have shark shields to keep sharks at bay, for the first time in her Oceans Seven campaign O’Reilly was stung several times by jellyfish.
“I got a tentacle wrapped around my leg and couldn’t get it off,” she says.
The Oceans Seven was devised in 2008 as the swimming equivalent of the Seven Summits mountaineering challenge. The seven swims are the 36.2km Strait of Gibraltar, the 43.2km North Channel between Ireland and Scotland, Japan’s 41km Tsugaru Strait, the 33km English Channel, the 23km Cook Strait, the 32km Catalina Channel, about 22 kms from Los Angeles, and the Moloka’i Channel. 
“Individually these swims are incredible to complete, but to be one of the few who have completed them all is monumental,” O’Reilly’s guide and mentor Phillip Rush says.
Rush knows about channel swimming; he has swum the English Channel 10 times including a phenomenal triple crossing in 28 hours and 21 minutes.
At one point O’Reilly was tracking to be the fastest female to ever swim the Moloka’i Channel, the longest of the Oceans Seven. But sea sickness kicked in after five hours.
“I spent the rest of the time throwing up three times every half an hour, while just trying to just keep going,” she says.  
Rush adds: “It wasn’t an easy swim. She wasn’t getting out, she wanted to finish this no matter how badly she felt.  She was hardly fed for seven hours as what went down would have come up.   
“If I had offered for her to get out, I would have been told to bugger off.”   
O’Reilly nods.
The Oceans Seven took O’Reilly seven years and eight months to complete. No other female teenager has completed five of the seven ocean swims, let alone all seven.
She suffered fatigue and sea sickness on her first Moloka’i attempt in November last year, and that swim was abandoned after 16 hours, with just eight kilometres remaining.
“I was pretty gutted at that because we put in a lot of effort, and I had prepared for it   and thought I had the capability to do it – but I got massively seasick,” she says.
Rush adds that she “fought like an ox from beginning to end, but conditions were really choppy.”
Her second attempt in July was abandoned after three hours due to unfavourable conditions. So did it cross the determined swimmer’s mind this time that she might not have been able to make it again after seasickness?
“Yeah, but I wanted it so bad, I just didn’t care,” she says. “I wanted to keep on swimming until I reached the end.”
Rush: “It’s an amazing achievement from an amazing young athlete.”
O’Reilly is in her final year at AUT, where she is studying to be a paramedic. Her classmates must think she’s a bit mad attempting the seven gruelling swims, while packing her study materials.
“They are just wrapping their heads around it,” she says. “I was supposed to be having an exam now, and they said, ‘why aren’t you here, aren’t you supposed to be studying for exams’? And I’m, like, ‘no, I’m busy, I’ve got other things to do’.”
Rush: “We encourage study while we’re travelling. But quite often the books don’t get out the suitcase.”
“Yes, they do,” O’Reilly retorts. “I attempt to study.”
O’Reilly, who swims for the North Shore Swimming Club, doesn’t know when she’ll get back in the water.
“I’m still processing the swims. I’ve made no decisions. I’ll probably just live a little bit and not wake up at 4.30am every morning – that will be nice,” she says.  
She says while the seven swims have been gruelling, she wouldn’t change a thing.
“It’s definitely been worth it. Looking back on it now, it’s worth every experience, all the people I’ve met and the opportunities I’ve had.”
One thing she won’t miss is long distance flying.
“She doesn’t like travel – she hates airplanes,” Rush says.
“Yeah, it’s exhausting – I just get bored. We live too far away from everything in New Zealand,” O’Reilly adds.
O’Reilly, also a competent pool swimmer, prefers the ocean rather than staring at a black line in a swimming pool.
“In the ocean, it’s not necessarily about speed, it’s not about getting a certain time, it’s just about wanting to get to the other side,” she says.
And that other side was 42.5km away, and this time, after three attempts, she finally did it to achieve her Oceans Seven goal.
She will now get her name in the Guinness Book of Records as the youngest swimmer to complete the great seven. Knocked the bastard off, as the great Sir Edmund Hillary said after Everest.