Catherine Breed's Odyssey & Charting New Waters

Diving into the Athlete's Journey through Shark-Infested Waters and Environmental Storytelling

Guest host Natasha Benjamin and Vicki Goldstein interview open-water swimmer and Sea Dreamers founder Cathrine Breed about her plan to swim the California coast and use the feat as a platform for local conservation. Breed traces her early ocean connection to family trips in New Zealand and a formative example of sailor Ellen MacArthur, then explains her transition from elite pool competition to marathon swims via San Francisco’s Dolphin Club. She recounts the Farallon Islands-to–Golden Gate record attempt—starting at 10:45 p.m. in 55–56°F water without a wetsuit—detailing fear of sharks, currents, cold-induced fixation, and disorienting night wildlife encounters that required crew support and even a mid-swim suit change. Breed outlines “Swim California”: roughly 900 miles from the Oregon border starting around July 1, five hours daily for four months, paired with 10–13 pop-up events that hand attention to local groups addressing kelp loss, whale ship strikes, oil risks, and Indigenous connections, with tracking and updates via SwimCalifornia.com, and Instagram.

A Love Letter to the Coast: Catherine Breed's 900-Mile Swim for California's Soul

There are swimmers, and then there are people for whom the water is a kind of reckoning. Catherine Breed belongs to the second category.

Her connection to the ocean began not with a race clock but with a family trip to New Zealand — two kids and an open coastline, the particular freedom of salt water and no agenda. It wasn't a conversion experience. It was something quieter: the beginning of a long conversation between a person and the sea.

The competitive pool came first. Cal swimming, two Pan American gold medals, the disciplined world of split times and lane lines. But when Breed graduated and found her way to San Francisco's legendary Dolphin Club, something shifted. The bay opened up beneath her, cold and unscripted, and she discovered that what she'd loved about swimming was never really about the pool at all. When club members suggested the English Channel, she thought they were crazy. She swam it anyway.

The Mind at Mile Ten

Marathon open water swimming is, above almost any other athletic endeavor, a negotiation with one's own psychology. Breed is candid about this. The first hour is adrenaline management — settling into pace, quieting the alarm bells, getting to the first feed. After that, the mind does what it wants: replaying training sessions, cycling through gratitude for the people who got her there, occasionally going mercifully blank.

The Farallon Islands swim made the negotiation harder. Thirty miles west of the Golden Gate, a place locals call Devil's Teeth — named for both the rock formations and what circles beneath them — she slid into 56-degree water at 10:45 PM, the countdown delivered in a whisper. They were all operating on the collective belief that quiet would keep the great whites asleep. It doesn't work that way, biologically. But the mind takes what it can get.

What undid her wasn't the cold or the sharks. It was a bait ball — a churning mass of sardines drawing seabirds from every direction, their eyes catching the boat lights and flickering like a distant city skyline. For hours, Breed swam toward what looked like San Francisco. It wasn't. That particular cruelty — hope extended and retracted, mile after mile — tested her more than the water temperature ever did. She finished. She was the seventh person in history to do it.

The Swim California Project

This July, Breed begins something of an entirely different scale: approximately 900 miles from the Oregon border to the Mexican line, swimming roughly five hours a day, tracing the full length of California's coast. She estimates four months. The ocean, as it always does, will have its own opinion about the timeline.

But Swim California is not simply an athletic undertaking. Working with filmmaker and storyteller Natasha Benjamin, Breed has designed the journey as a series of encounters — ten to thirteen community pop-ups where local conservation organizations step forward to tell their own stories. Breed draws the crowd. Then she hands over the microphone.

The issues are real and pressing: kelp forest collapse, humpback whales lost to ship strikes, the ongoing specter of expanded offshore oil drilling. Breed is careful to note she's not the expert on any of it. That's the point. The swim creates proximity — to the coast, to the communities living alongside it, to the problems most people never encounter at ground level.

She wants to hear from tribal nations whose relationship to these waters predates any conservation nonprofit by centuries. She wants to spotlight the women doing the unglamorous work of marine stewardship. She founded Sea Dreamers on exactly this premise: that people protect what they love, and they love what they know.

What the Ocean Asks

When asked what the ocean communicates to someone who spends this much time in it, Breed pauses. She knows what it gives her — a reprieve from the controlled, optimized version of herself she carries on land. In the water, plans don't survive. Pride doesn't survive. The waves come when they come.

What the ocean needs from her — from any of us — is a question she's still learning to ask. The 900 miles ahead may begin to answer it.

Progress can be tracked at swimcalifornia.com, with video updates on the LA Sports YouTube channel and ongoing dispatches from Breed's Instagram at cathrine.breed. The Rising Tide Ocean Podcast, hosted by Vicki Nichols Goldstein, continues to document the intersection of ocean science, advocacy, and the human stories that make both matter.