Chris Bertish plans solo Pacific crossing on open catamaran
Chris Bertish will try to solo 2,600 nautical miles from Mission Bay to Oahu in a 20-foot Nacra with no cabin, no shelter and no support boat.
Chris Bertish is taking a stripped-down beach cat into the kind of Pacific crossing that usually belongs to much bigger boats. The TransCat Expedition 2026 is set to send him solo and unsupported from Mission Bay, San Diego, to Oahu, Hawaii, on an open 20-foot Nacra catamaran with no fixed cabin, no shelter and no support boat.
That setup is what makes the attempt so severe. The route is about 2,600 nautical miles, with an estimated crossing time of 23 to 28 days, and the boat, called The Wildcat, will rely on wind and solar power alone. On a platform like this, every decision gets magnified: how much gear can be carried, how Bertish manages sleep on an exposed deck, how he handles weather routing, and how much margin he has if conditions turn ugly. This is not a comfort-driven passage; it is a survival test wrapped around a multihull.
Bertish has also tied the project to a broader fundraising push. His campaign is aimed at a circular-economy classroom in northern Kenya, educational sessions for the Nine Miles Project, Waves for Change and the Sentinel Alliance, tree planting through SeaTrees and Word Forest, and coral restoration in Hanauma Bay, Hawaii. The fundraising page tied to the expedition sets a goal of $28,000.
The 2026 attempt carries extra weight because Bertish already tried this once. He launched from Mission Bay on June 24, 2025, got about 100 nautical miles offshore, then turned back after electronics and safety concerns forced a rethink. Instead of pushing on unchanged, he postponed the official relaunch, spent the following year fixing and retesting the boat, and treated the setback like engineering data rather than a dead end.
That history matters because the Pacific is not forgiving to a cabin-less beach cat. Mission Bay itself is a man-made waterway, carved out of former wetlands and marshland in the late 1940s, while Hanauma Bay, one of the expedition’s environmental targets, is Hawaii’s first Marine Life Conservation District, established in 1967. Bertish has been here before in larger-than-life fashion too, winning the Mavericks big-wave surfing event in 2010 and becoming the first person to cross the Atlantic Ocean on a stand-up paddleboard in 2017. The Pacific catamaran run now asks the same question in a different language: how far can a very small, very exposed multihull be pushed before judgment, preparation and survival separate from the stunt itself?
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