Announcing Maui Channel Swim!

I am so sorry that I have been out of the loop for a little while, finishing up my undergraduate career at Smith College. After I graduate in a few weeks, my family and I will be heading to Maui for vacation and I will get to do a swim that I have dreamt about since I first visited the island. I plan to swim the Auau channel from the island of Lanai back to Maui sometime between May 29th and June 1st.

 This swim has a straight line distance of 8.8 miles and has been completed by around 150 people since 2000 and several more before that. Although this swim is shorter than many of the marathon swims that I have been training for recently, it also presents new challenges, including warm water and wildlife.

The water temperature between these two islands hovers in the high 70s, which is similar to the temperature of many competitive swimming pools. I have never done an ocean swim in water this warm and am excited to discover the unique challenges this will present! I have been training almost exclusively in the pool at the moment as I am still in Massachusetts, but my training has been going well and I hope to get an at least one ocean training swim completed when I am in California before heading to Maui.

I don’t have a date set for the swim yet because my boat captain prefers to watch the weather and decide on a date once we are on the island! I will update this blog once I have more details but you will be able to follow my swim at track.rs/abby.