One Woman’s Love Story to The California Coast is to Swim It
Swimmer Cat Breed will trace the state’s 900 miles over four months
Imagine swimming in the ocean for four minutes. Most of us can manage that. How about four hours? Few people have the desire to try or the training to accomplish it. What about four months?
In July, San Francisco swimmer Catherine Breed will be the first human to attempt to swim California’s 900-mile coastline from the Oregon border in the north to the Mexico border in the south. She expects to finish sometime in October.
Cat, 33, as she’s known to us fellow Dolphin Club members, is a legend. A decorated pool swimmer when she went to Cal Berkeley, she discovered open water swimming after college and fell in love with the ocean again.
A native Californian, she grew up on the Pacific Ocean, spending long sailboat trips as a child with her family. In one of her YouTube videos, she said that part of this massive swim is making her own relationship to the water outside of her sailor-father.
I too was raised on the California coast and it’s always held me in awe. I was almost drowned by a sneaker wave on a Sonoma County beach when I was five and ever since have been obsessed with being near, in and on the water. My father was an editor and journalist and it took me years to make writing my own and not feel it was in relation to him and our relationship.
California is a coastline but also an idea, a place where dreamers flourish on the edge of the world.
What Cat is doing is so much bigger than a swim, it is connecting the dreams of Californians from Arcata to San Diego. The state is so big and long and diverse, there’s few ways to capture it. This is one.
Swim California is a project she’s been imagining for years and planning for the last two. The logistics are extraordinary. Beyond fundraising for the effort and the non-profit Sea Dreamers, there was a live-aboard boat to secure, mapping each leg of the coast to be swimmed, plus temps, tides and creatures to consider. She will quit her full time job as a medical device sales rep during the swim.
“There’s never a good time to do something this big or something scary. And if you don’t do it when you’re thinking about it, it probably will never happen.”
-marathon swimmer Catherine Breed to California, UC Berkeley’s alumni magazine
Unlike Cat’s record-setting swim last August from the sharky Farallon Islands to San Francisco, Swim California will be a staged swim. This means she will swim a number or hours or miles each day and then get out of the water and begin the next day at the same spot she finished. WOWSA (the World Open Water Swimming Association) will ratify the swim based on careful record keeping, including stroke rate, water temperature, GPS tracking, and photo and video evidence from an independent observer. Also unlike the Farallons, she will swim in a wetsuit so cold water endurance doesn’t limit her in any way. The ocean water temps along the coast from July to October will likely range from the mid-50s near Oregon to the low-80s near San Diego.
No big swim is done alone and Cat has had the support of friends, boat pilots, kayakers, and other endurance athletes to prepare. She consulted Ross Edgley, another ultra-marathon adventure swimmer who swam 1,780 miles around Britain (during which his tongue nearly disintegrated from the constant salt water exposure) in 2018 and 1,000 miles around Iceland in 2025.
Swimmers like Cat inspire me to go beyond what I think I can do in the water. Would I swim every day for four months, ie 120 days?
Goals are funny things I’ve found. After spending most of my life avoiding them because of my profound fear of failure, in my fifties (and now sixties) I’ve embraced them. Maybe it’s the Fuck ‘Em, who cares, of this third stage of life or the cumulative therapy, wisdom, and replacing alcohol with cold water as a coping mechanism.
So far, I’ve made my lifelong goals of swimming Alcatraz and the Golden Gate. These early milestones in my swimming life led me to goals like swimming Heaven to Hell (8 miles from Angel Island to San Quentin Prison, which took 5 hours) and a Catalina Channel relay swim. Then I wanted to try ice swimming, which I loved. Next up on my bucket list is to swim a relay Around Manhattan, which is booked for the end of August.
Come to think of it, I probably swam close to 60 days in a row the winter I swam 60 miles for my Dolphin Club Polar Bear swim to honor turning 60.
In my writing life, I transcended my journalism training to embrace vulnerability. I started my Substack in 2024. And in 2025 I finished The Muckraker’s Daughter*, my memoir about planning my gonzo editor father’s crazy funeral in three days.
Our impossible dreams are closer than we imagine.
I encourage you to donate to Swim California if you are able. The swim will also raise money for Sea Dreamers, a nonprofit whose mission is to bring more women and girls to California’s beaches and to protect the coast and ocean.
Whether you swim for four minutes, four hours, or four months, just get in the water. And help protect it for those that will follow us.
“Getting through tough moments in life, I always got to the coast, to the ocean,” Breed says. “It’s a gift to have that. I want to show people that. …This is my love story to the California coast.”
*On submission with Pete Mulvihill of The Watermark Agency.
I’m certain that swimming nearly every day keeps me sane. One day, you’ll have to come up here and swim with me in beautiful British Columbia
Love. Ocean.