Daniel Shailer shares how Stephanie Montero Bending swam across Banderas Bay, Mexico, for the first time, galvanising a community of swimmers

Stephanie Montero Bending must be easy to buy presents for. She really likes whales.

When we meet on Saturday at a cafe in the south of Mexico City she’s wearing a whale tail baseball cap, blue t-shirt with two whales, and a whale tail necklace (gifted from a friend who knows she likes whales). She picks up her phone to find a video of whales.

Her background is a humpback whale, breaching backwards with its white, ribbed belly up to the sun.

Something about seeing a whale in the wild, according to Montero, levels people. “It’s like taking off a mask,” she says. “You have to shout – in a way you become you.”

Still, one Saturday evening, the 18th of November, Montero went further than most for whales. At 5:30pm, she started swimming from Islas Marietas in the mouth of Banderas Bay, on the Pacific coast of Mexico, heading for the mainland. 14 hours, 30 minutes and 58 seconds later she arrived on a beach in Puerto Vallarta, exhausted and crying with joy.

Alongside her swim, Montero brought together over 1000 other swimmers in a weeklong fundraiser for ECOBAC: a charity researching and rescuing whales from discarded fishing nets in the bay. No one has swum the length of Banderas Bay before. In 2020 another Mexican swimmer, Mariel Hawley, swam across the mouth of the bay in a little over nine hours. For Hawley the swim came after an accomplished career in open water, culminating in 2019 when she became the 15th person to complete the Oceans Seven (a challenge comprising the English Channel and six other sea swims from Japan and New Zealand to California).