Catherine Breed completes 900-mile swim down California coast after 111 days
Catherine Breed, a 33-year-old ultra-endurance swimmer, completed a 900-mile swim along the entire California coast, finishing at San Diego’s Coronado Beach on Monday afternoon, 111 days after she began at the state’s northern border on 1 July. The Bay Area native reached the southern end of the route in less than four months.
Breed began planning the coast-to-coast swim three years ago and framed the effort as a personal endurance test and an environmental statement. She told the San Francisco Chronicle, “For months, I measured my world in the next few miles,” adding she moved through the ocean with “whales beneath me, plastic beside me”. In a social media post she compared the daily exertion to “doing a trail 50k or a half Ironman every day for about 110 days.”
She completed the route in stages, averaging about 10 miles per day with a shipboard support team that also officially documented the attempt for the World Open Water Swimming Association. Breed slept on the support vessel, made stops along the coast to run events with ocean conservation groups, and streamed much of the swim on YouTube, including Monday’s “historic finish”.
One of the final hurdles was polluted water near Imperial Beach at the US–Mexico border, which Breed described as “some of the dirtiest water in the United States, if not the world” and said felt like “swimming through sewage.” In a video posted on her Instagram on Sunday she also noted public focus on marine predators, saying, “Everyone’s been so fixated on sharks ... We are more fearful about that than we are about the damage and destruction that we are causing to our own home.”
Breed's southward crossing took place amid a pronounced Super El Niño in the Pacific, which brought multiple tropical storms, large waves and a northward-moving Kelvin wave as she swam. Speaking to San Diego’s KPBS, she said the extreme weather had been the hardest part, with “the current is quite literally going against us the entire way”; she and her team navigated waves as high as 7ft that she described as feeling like swimming “in a washing machine.”
A former University of California, Berkeley long-distance swimmer and a member of the US national team, Breed shifted to open-water challenges after joining San Francisco’s Dolphin Club. She told KQED she grew up around the water and that “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.” Her previous feats include setting a Lake Tahoe length record in 2017 in just under 9 hours, becoming the first person in 2022 to swim from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge to Half Moon Bay (a 25-mile route), and completing a 30-mile swim last year from the Farallon Islands to the Golden Gate Bridge through shark-filled waters.
On her relationship with the ocean Breed told KQED earlier this year: “You cannot bring hubris or expectations into the ocean – whether you’re surfing, spearfishing, sailing or swimming. You can’t. 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.”