San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Swimmer nails 27 miles from S.F. to Half Moon Bay
Catherine Breed bodysurfed into the sand at Surfers Beach in El Granada, exhausted, capping a 12-hour, 21-minute swim south along the coast from the Golden Gate Bridge, a feat no open water swimmer had accomplished.
Dozens of spectators, including Breed’s mother and boyfriend, cheered and applauded her arrival Wednesday afternoon.
“It definitely was the soulful swim I was looking for,” Breed said later. “It was fun in moments, and there were moments when I was ready to stop.”
The journey started smoothly, with a 4:30 a.m. departure in which Breed rode the ebb tide that sucks water out of San Francisco Bay and carried her through Daly City. “It’s like a moving walkway,” she said.
Six hours in, her left shoulder was killing her — nerve pain shooting through her arm on every other stroke — but she soldiered on. By Thursday morning, she couldn’t lift her left arm and had lost range of motion in her right.
“I had a moment in my head, like, if my shoulder gets worse, I’ll be finishing this on one arm,” Breed said. “But I’m sure after some ibuprofen, it’ll be back to normal.”
The home stretch from Montara to El Granada was “smooth quick water,” Breed said. She wore a one-piece suit, goggles, cap and ear plugs. Accompanying her was a support crew of nine people — a small boat, Jet Ski and kayak — who assisted with navigation,
Catherine Breed swam 27 miles from the Golden Gate Bridge to Half Moon Bay in 12 hours and 21 minutes, the first person to do so.
safety, feeding and other logistics, like keeping an eye out for dorsal fins slicing through the water’s surface. She paused every half hour to suck down a few gulps of a calorie shake in a thermos tossed to her on a leash from her support boat.
Thankfully, there were no shark encounters. Part of the reason Breed planned her swim for September, apart from optimal weather conditions, is that it’s just before peak shark season off the Northern California coast, a time when great whites return to the region to feed.
She did swim through
intermittent patches of jellyfish, but came through unscathed. The 27-mile swim was Breed’s longest. Others have overlapped with parts of the route, but no one had linked San Francisco to Half Moon Bay in one go like this.
Breed, 29, of Mill Valley, is “probably the most gifted Bay Area open water swimmer currently, in terms of both toughness and speed,” said David Holscher, an established open water swimmer who captained Breed’s support boat during her swim.
A lifelong competitive swimmer, Breed grew up
in Pleasanton and spent weekends as a kid sailing with her parents in the bay. After college at UC Berkeley, which she said she attended on a full athletic scholarship, Breed discovered the Dolphin Club, a hub of the bay’s water sports community, and transitioned to open water swimming.
She “quickly fell in love” with it, she said, and began ticking off milestones of the sport’s elite.
In 2017, she set the record for a 21-mile crossing of Lake Tahoe with a time of 8 hours, 56 minutes. In 2018, she swam the English Channel, a 21-mile feat Breed characterized
Sas “the Mount Everest of swimming.” Then she knocked off a notoriously difficult North Channel crossing between Ireland and Scotland, widely considered “the ultimate in difficult channel swimming,” according to OpenWaterPedia, the sport’s chronicler.
“For me, these long swims have been a journey of, am I capable? How tough am I? Is this possible?” Breed said.
Breed’s larger goal is to complete the Oceans Seven, a mega-objective akin to the Seven Summits of mountaineering that distinguishes the world’s top ocean swimmers.
After drying off Wednesday evening, Breed and her entourage hit the nearby Old Princeton Landing for beers and burgers.
Someone on social media sent Breed a quote: “Appreciation is a wonderful thing. It makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.”
“I feel that appreciation towards my team,” Breed said, “and I think they share that with me.”
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