DALLAS – Starting this summer, 47-year-old Frenchman Ben Lecomte will try to become the first person to swim across the Pacific Ocean.

He has the credentials – in 1998 he became the first person to swim across the Atlantic.

Lecomte estimates his 8850-kilometre Pacific crossing will take five months, swimming eight hours a day.

The mission will take him straight through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a floating rubbish dump the size of Texas in the middle of the ocean.

Lecomte said the aim is to showcase the effects of mindless consumption and how it ends up in our food chain.

“We want to show people what is around because 80 per cent of the plastic you find in the ocean comes from land.

“What you see on the surface of the Great Pacific Patch is only 15 per cent because 70 per cent is in the water column and the other 15 per cent is on the bottom.”

Footage from the journey –which will be live-streamed and documented on social media –will give him the opportunity to talk about sustainability to a global audience.

“We create our own problem, basically,” he said. “I think we have the opportunity to talk about that and engage people to realise we have the solution in our hands. We can change our habits and what we do on a daily basis to change what we do to the environment.”

The monumental feat will mean swimming freestyle for eight hours a day wearing a snorkel and following a rope in the water attached to a support boat where he will sleep in the evening. He’ll also wear a thick wetsuit to ward off jellyfish stings and sunburn.

The exact start date hasn’t been set yet as it depends on whether and when the support boat will be fully equipped with his specific needs, including an electrode which creates an electromagnetic field to ward off curious sharks.

He’ll drink liquid meals during the day to keep up his 8000 calories and eat four big meals – including two in the middle of the night.

“It’s unfortunately not five-star meals but after swimming for eight hours you are not very picky about what you want to eat, you just want to eat.”

As for how his body swill survive six months of constant movement, Lecomte said the good thing about low-impact swimming is that there are no joint problems of tendinitis that come with it.

“It’s good on the body. What you have to do is manage your effort and swim at a regular pace you can sustain. It’s almost like a person who would walk fast rather than a runner.”

For now, Lecomte is focused on training and keeping up his endurance. He’s also avoiding ocean swims to make sure they stay novel.

“I don’t want to swim too much because I don’t want to lose the pleasure of swimming. Right now it’s lengths in the pool so it’s not that enjoyable.

“It’s all about endurance and keeping in shape – running, cycling and swimming..”

Once the swim is done his goal is to speak in schools about sustainability while raising funds for climate change and educating people on how they can reduce their carbon footprint.

He said his goal is about changing the mindset of consumers and not about getting his name in the record books.

“The adventure for me is within, I don’t look at it as swimming from Tokyo to San Francisco, I look at what is happening within me and what I want to do with my passion.”

He said every minute of his time will be scheduled.

The hardest challenge, he said, is not the physical one, but the mental discipline the journey will require.

“The last thing you want to do is not know what you’re going to do with your mind,” he said from his home in Dallas, Texas. “The first hour I relive any event, like a birthday party. The second hour is math exercise, like counting or dividing numbers.”

“The third one, I try to visualise or imagine a place I never been to, like Australia. How would it be there? What would the sun be like? What’s it like when I pass someone in the street? I engage all my sense to disassociate my mind from my body.”

It’s a process Lecomte developed in a previous swim across the Atlantic Ocean that took 73 days. He said such challenges encompass his two passions – open water swimming and environmental sustainability.

“You have to start with a passion and I have done open water swimming and adventure swims for a long time, that’s what I’m passionate about,” he said.

“But I’ve noticed I find more plastic floating in the ocean, less fish, less, coral, less algae, less life in the ocean – so I want to use my passion as a platform to get attention on the issues and try to make a change and offer a better future for my children.”

He was inspired to do the first trip after watching someone row a boat from Boston to France.

After crunching the numbers himself he realised he could probably do it in a similar time without the heavy boat.

This time, the swim will take around six months but Lecomte said he only ever thinks about it on a daily basis: “Otherwise you cannot wrap your brain around it, it’s impossible”.

“What inspires me is my children and what happens for the next generation. We are going to leave them with a big liability and I want to help them with decreasing that liability. That’s the big adventure for me.”