Endurance athlete becomes first person to swim California's entire 900-mile coast

LOS ANGELES, Oct 21 - Ultra-endurance athlete Catherine Breed this week became the first person to swim California's entire 900-mile (1,448 km) coastline, completing the journey from Oregon to Mexico in less than four months.

Breed, 33, a San Francisco Bay Area native, confronted treacherous currents, storms, sharks and sewage as she swam a steady crawl stroke for up to five hours a day during her 111-day journey, according to organizers of the Swim California expedition.

She was flanked throughout the swim by a motorized dinghy and her team's 52-foot sailboat, the Catalyst, carrying observers who kept watch on her, tracked her coordinates and filmed her progress.

Swimming 3 to 5 miles offshore, she averaged about 10.3 miles a day and spent 18 days out of the water on scheduled rest stops and breaks forced by inclement weather, spokesperson William Rinehart told Reuters on Wednesday.

Breed set out from Pacific waters off the California-Oregon border on July 1 and reached the finish line at the US-Mexico maritime boundary on Monday.

Her support crew hastened Breed out of the water on several occasions when sharks were spotted. Perhaps her biggest physical challenges were heavy ocean currents running northward directly against her off northern California, intensified by super El Niño conditions prevailing in the eastern Pacific.

Barely able to make headway against the powerful current, Breed adopted a strategy in which she reversed course and backtracked north along some stretches to make up for southbound segments that became nearly impassable, Rinehart said.

To stay nourished, Breed consumed more than 6,000 calories a day, well more than required to stay fit under normal circumstances. Near the end of her journey, she took prophylactic antibiotics to ward off infections from raw sewage known to pollute waters off the California-Mexico border.

Through it all, Breed remained healthy and avoided jellyfish stings or other injuries, Rinehart said.

Breed has touted a lifelong passion for the sea and said she undertook her record-making expedition to raise awareness of the fragile ocean ecosystem and marine conservation issues.

She has already logged a number of extreme-endurance swimming accomplishments, including nine open-water records, and holds the fastest swimming time across Lake Tahoe, straddling California and Nevada.

In a YouTube video message recorded at the start of her expedition, Breed said: "I want to tell the story of how the ocean has changed my life, and I want people to protect this coastline." REUTERS