Gili Islands Swim Lombok

I have been travelling to the Gili Islands in Lombok Indonesia since 2011 - mostly for scuba diving and family holidays.

Back in January 2016, I visited Gili Air in Lombok to settle my daughter in for a 4-month stay as she wanted to take a Dive Master course after completing her A-Levels.

During that visit, I would wake early and walk/jog around the island every morning; it is about 5km all the way round. One morning, I woke up and decided that, as a regular pool swimmer and occasional open water swimmer, I would swim around the island instead.

Jan 2025: The germ of an idea

In 2023, I decided that this was a passion that I could not ignore and I setup Island Swims Asia with a goal of finding more locations to swim, whilst maintaining the Gili Islands swim as the main event for the year for my Masters group and the wider public. 2025 will be no different and we head to the Gilis to swim on November 15th 2025. Join us if you want a challenging but thrilling adventure swimming these islands.

And, yes, we still stay at Manta Dive Gili Air for accommodation and we still use Helmut for our boats.

Returning to Singapore, we were determined to repeat the adventure each year and have repeated the swim every year since (with the exception of the 2 global pandemic years) and I became the defacto organiser as my original cohort of 5 gradually left Singapore over the years. I have now organised and run 7 Gili Island swims in total since (with the exception of the 2 global pandemic years) with over 80 swimmers in total making it round the islands.

We rented a boat from Helmut, next door to Manta Dive who sent us out with a boat captain and one crew member. Following the advice of one of the dive instructors, we chose to swim the first island anti-clockwise and after 5 hard hours, we completed the swim and went back to crash knowing we had a slightly easier day with the smaller Gili Meno. We zipped round in a little under 3 hours aided by a magical current that seemed to be with us all the way. Finally, day 3, and after 4 hours of swimming, we also had Gili Air under our belts. You can find the video of this trip at the bottom of this page.

The feeling was truly exhilarating.

In the April that year, 6 of us decided that in November we should attempt to swim not one, but all three islands.

We had no idea if it was possible but we wanted to give it a go. Knowing the islands as well as I do from my scuba trips, I worked out a plan:

• We would do Gili Trawangan, the largest and furthest island, first.

• After this, it would be Gili Meno, the smallest.

• Finally we would swim Gili Air, our home island and where we were staying at Manta Dive.

I was so happy and felt exhilarated at what I had just accomplished - at the same time I also felt strangely disappointed - why? I came to realise that there was a sense of "incompletion" because I had not been able to completely circumnavigate the island. Something in me realised that the sense of achievement in actually swimming round an island without touching land was what I was actually striving for. That passion for circumnavigation of an island has stayed with me ever since. and whilst I did not realise it at the time, this was the kernel of a passion that would, many years later, become Island Swims Asia

I took a water bottle, some snacks, a towel and my phone in a dry bag (note - not a tow buoy) and set off early. I swam on my own and by staying very close to the beach, I knew that I could always head to the shore if I was tired and needed a break. I was able to swim most of the way round - until I reached the start of the south-western reef. By then, the tide was low and the reef had been exposed meaning I could not swim over it. To swim round the reef would require me to swim nearly 1 km offshore to where the surf was now breaking far away from the beach. It looked scary. I decided it was too risky to swim so far out on my own, so I swam to shore, walked 500m past the reef and the harbour, re-entered the water and completed the swim.

My immediate thoughts on completing the swim were (1) that I needed to swim with a support boat - for visibility and somewhere to store my provisions for what would surely be a multi-hour swim and (2) I wanted to share this experience with others.

On heading back to Singapore I began to talk about and enthuse some of my fellow Masters swimmers at the club in Singapore where I regularly trained - and still do.

The Gili Swim 2016 video