Ultra-endurance swimmer Catherine Breed has set a new benchmark in open-water endurance swimming by becoming the first person to swim California’s entire 900-mile (1,448 km) coastline. Breed completed the journey from Oregon to Mexico in 111 days—less than four months—according to organizers of the Swim California expedition.
Breed, 33, a former University of California, Berkeley, long-distance swimmer and member of the US national team, made her breakthrough into open-water swimming after graduation as part of San Francisco’s Dolphin Club. She grew up in, on and around the water on California’s coast, and told local radio station KQED: “At one point in my life, I think I had swum and sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge more times than I had driven over it.”
Breed braved treacherous currents, notorious storms, sharks and sewage, maintaining a steady crawl stroke for up to five hours a day during her 111-day journey. Given the circumstances she encountered, the feat bordered on the miraculous. She fought a glorious battle with the ocean, overcoming adversity against the gravest odds. In every segment, she seemed reborn. Breed pushed endurance and mental resilience into surreal realms. Her mission was so sensational and dramatic that it could fill a book—an ultimate testament to self-discovery and self-realization.
Breed harbored a lifelong passion for the sea and said she embarked on her record-making expedition to raise awareness of the fragile ocean ecosystem and marine conservation issues. She recalled that she planned the coastal swim as an examination of her own personal endurance, a celebration of her love for the California coast, a way to highlight and champion environmental preservation efforts, and an attempt to inspire more women and girls to spend time in and around the ocean.
The Journey
She was accompanied throughout the swim by a motorized dinghy and her team’s 52-foot sailboat, the Catalyst, carrying observers who monitored her, tracked her coordinates and filmed her progress.
Breed divided the journey into stages, completing about 10 miles per day with a shipboard support team who also officially documented the adventure for the World Open Water Swimming Association. She slept onboard the ship and stopped along the coast to attend events with ocean conservation groups.
Swimming three to five miles offshore, she averaged approximately 10.3 miles a day and spent 18 days out of the water on scheduled rest stops and breaks forced by turbulent and erratic weather.
Breed set out from Pacific waters off the California-Oregon border on July 1 and completed her historic mission at the US-Mexico maritime boundary on Monday.
Her support crew pulled Breed out of the water on several occasions when sharks were spotted. Her most dangerous and persistent physical challenges were heavy ocean currents running northward directly against her off northern California, intensified by Super El Niño conditions in the eastern Pacific.
Barely able to advance against the powerful current, Breed adopted a strategy of reversing course and backtracking north along some stretches to make progress where the southbound route became almost impassable.
To stay nourished, Breed consumed more than 6,000 calories a day—far more than she would need under normal circumstances. Near the end of her journey, she took prophylactic antibiotics to protect herself from infections from raw sewage known to pollute waters off the California-Mexico border.
Previous Accomplishments
Breed has already accomplished a number of extreme-endurance swimming feats, including nine open-water records. She holds the fastest swimming time across Lake Tahoe, which straddles California and Nevada. In 2017, she set the record for the fastest person to swim the length of California’s Lake Tahoe in just under nine hours. In 2022, at age 29, Breed became the first person to swim from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge to Half Moon Bay, a 25-mile swim. Last year, she completed a 30-mile swim through shark-filled waters from the Farallon Islands to the Golden Gate Bridge.
The record-breaking American open-water swimmer previously swam the English Channel in 2018 and completed the North Channel crossing between Northern Ireland and Scotland in 2019—widely considered one of the toughest endurance swims in the world. But those famous 21-mile open-ocean crossings were just a quick dip in the pool compared with the 900-mile wild swim along the California coast that Breed and her team began planning three years ago.
“It is like doing a trail 50k or a half Ironman every day for about 110 days,” Breed said in a social media post.
Hazards Faced During the Swim
One of the most perilous moments came at the very end, as she swam through polluted waters off Imperial Beach at the US-Mexico border, which she called “some of the dirtiest water in the United States, if not the world,” reminiscent of “swimming through sewage.”
“Everyone’s been so fixated on sharks,” Breed said in a video posted on her Instagram on Sunday. “We are so scared about these animals that live in the ocean and have no interest in us, and we are more fearful about that than we are about the damage and destruction that we are causing to our own home.”
The swim took place during what was expected to be a season of unparalleled Super El Niño weather in the Pacific Ocean, packed with multiple tropical storms, violent waves that hit the California coastline, and a turbulent intrusion of warm coastal water called a “Kelvin wave” that traveled northward as Breed swam south.
Breed told local news outlets that the extreme weather was the most testing and arduous part of the challenge. She told San Diego’s KPBS that because of the Super El Niño, “the current is quite literally going against us the entire way.”
As part of the journey, Breed met waves as high as seven feet, which she described as feeling like swimming “in a washing machine.”
After the Swim
“You cannot bring hubris or expectations into the ocean—whether you’re surfing, spearfishing, sailing or swimming. You can’t,” Breed told KQED earlier this year. “When I get in the ocean, it’s a full surrender. You’re completely present. Your only job is to put one arm in front of the other and be at peace with whatever the ocean gives you that day.”
Before you ask: yes, there were sharks, but Breed said the fins were spotted by her team from so far away that they were not “even a part of the swim.” She did say, however, that staying a few miles offshore helped her avoid being mistaken for shark food.
Keeping one to five miles from shore also helped her avoid man-made obstacles, including crab pots. When planning the route, “we didn’t exactly follow every single curvature of the coast,” she said.
Ironic, perhaps, that when asked whether—having gone through the journey—she would recommend it to others, Breed chuckled.
“Absolutely not,” she said. “What I would recommend to other people is to get in the ocean. … The California coast is so beautiful, and I would recommend people get in the ocean in whatever way feels comfortable to you.
“It doesn’t have to be swimming,” she added. She said she hoped her journey would motivate others to get involved in groups working to protect the ocean.
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Harsh Thakor is a freelance journalist who swam the English Channel in 1988
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