42 miles of open water and ocean swells to test state’s top women paddlers

Team member (and WWU faculty member) Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a 52-year-old paddler from Bellingham, spoke about the specific difficulties paddlers encounter in the race.

“It’s open-ocean conditions,” she said. “Conditions in the channel can be much bigger in terms of the wave size than we see here… There’s also a really mental aspect of going that long, that hard, in potentially gnarly conditions.”