Top 7 Ocean Challenges

Teen Girl Battles Jellyfish to Complete 27-mile Swim–May Soon Be Youngest to Finish the Top 7 Ocean Challenges

New Zealand’s Cook Strait is considered one of the most dangerous stretches of open water in the world. Strong winds can produce violent storms, massive waves, and unpredictable currents. Jellyfish litter the surface. Sharks lurk in the depths below.

And yet, 17-year-old Maya Merhige was determined to cross it. The California teen is hoping to become the youngest person ever to complete the famous Oceans Seven—the most daunting open-water swims across the world.

The Berkeley native swam across the English Channel last summer and has also crossed the Catalina Channel near Los Angeles and the Moloka’i Channel in Hawaii.

In April, she took on the Cook Strait, which also required facing one of her greatest fears—jellyfish.

Every few strokes, Maya would get stung, the welts piling up on her arms, face, nose, and lips. The currents kept swirling. She had to stop every 30 minutes to eat too, with the exertion of the task requiring a regular calorie intake.

After 14 hours, eight minutes, and 36 seconds in the water, Maya finally stepped onto dry land again, completing her fourth of the famed ‘Oceans Seven’.

One of the motivating factors that propelled her along the way was an ongoing charity fundraiser she created. Maya survived a benign pancreatic tumor in 2023 and one of her close friends is also a cancer survivor. Thus, she has linked her swims to the nonprofit group Swim Across America, already raising over the years the huge sum of $150,000 for pediatric cancer research.

“One of the main reasons that I would like to complete the Oceans Seven is because of the opportunities that it gives me to explore the world and meet such cool groups of people. I love how different each swim is, and how they all come with different challenges and highlights,” she told SwimTrek.