Catherine Breed, 33, of Mill Valley swam California’s whole coast, about 900 miles, from Oregon to Mexico

Catherine Breed, 33, from Mill Valley, has finished a swim of California’s entire coast, about 900 miles, KSBW reported on 20 October, and nobody had done it before.

She set off from the Oregon border in July. Most days she swam for five to eight hours, in open water, with her crew on a boat beside her.

Breed picked the year back in 2023, and it turned out to be a super El Niño year, and that made it much harder. “I had no crystal ball saying it would be a super El Niño,” she told SFGATE. “It really forced us to work with Mother Nature every single day.”

The water was warmer than usual, all the way up to San Francisco. Storms out in the Pacific sent in big swell, and the crew sat through Hurricane Rachel. The current near the shore seemed to run north while she was trying to go south, so on some days she swam her section the other way, south to north. Josh Willis, a NASA scientist, told SFGATE that in an El Niño year the small current along the coast can stop or turn round.

Along the way she saw hundreds of whales, manta rays as far north as Malibu, and tuna and marlin. Dolphins played with her off Santa Barbara for about ten minutes. Near Morro Bay a mother humpback and her calf swam within 20 feet of her. “That was probably the coolest experience of my life,” she said.

The crew kept watch for sharks. “If the crew sees a fin, they just tell me, ‘Cat, shark!’” she said. She is out of the water in about five seconds, and once they called the day off.

The last miles ran from Point Loma past San Diego. Sewage from the Tijuana River pollutes the water near the shore there, so she finished about three miles out and crossed into Mexico at sea. “That’s why no one’s gonna see me finish,” she said.

Next she is going to a wedding in Central America.