I've been paddling around Gig Harbor for about twenty years now, with hundreds of trips in water shaped by tide and current.
For a period in 2018 I lived in a small cabin at Sunrise Beach, close enough to the water that the back door was only about fifteen feet from salt water. I paddled often, sometimes before dawn or at night. The Tacoma Narrows became less an abstract feature on a chart than something I learned by repetition: where the water accelerates, where it briefly eases along shore, and how quickly conditions can change around the turn of the tide.
There were nights when the water lit with bioluminescence, seals surfaced nearby, or smoke from summer fires softened the horizon. Other outings demanded much more attention to wind, chop and current. Over time, the Narrows became one of the places where I learned to pay close attention to moving water rather than simply paddle through it.
A national championship in Gig Harbor
That long relationship with the harbor made it especially interesting to have the 2026 USA SUP National Championships held here September 18–20.
The championships included sprint, 10K distance and technical racing. On the men's side, Bodie von Allmen won the sprint and long-distance titles, while Campbell Carter won the technical race. Sey Chelle swept all three women's disciplines.
The event was hosted with the Narrows Challenge and organized locally with the Gig Harbor Canoe & Kayak Racing Team, an organization that has been part of Gig Harbor's paddling culture for more than two decades. The team describes itself as an eleven-time national champion program, developing youth and adult canoe and kayak racers for regional, national and international competition.
That background matters. A national SUP championship in Gig Harbor did not feel disconnected from the place. Competitive paddling is already part of the harbor.
A board came north from Portland
Gorge Performance in Portland had boards at the event, and that created a convenient bit of logistics for me. I had found a used Starboard All Star through them at a very good price, and Kim Rueter was kind enough to bring it north with the rest of their equipment.
The board is a carbon Starboard All Star, 14 feet long and 28 inches wide, blue with an orange nose. I have its serial number, but I have not found a reliable public Starboard serial-number reference that lets me assign a model year with confidence, so I am leaving the year out rather than guessing.
The All Star is an all-water race design rather than a general recreational SUP. At fourteen feet it has the waterline of a race board, while the 28-inch width gives it more stability than the very narrow contemporary elite boards. That combination makes sense to me in Puget Sound, where flat water can become side chop, wakes or moving current without much notice.
There was something satisfying about the way it arrived. A national race was happening in the harbor, a Portland paddle shop was already driving north to support it, and a used race board came along for the ride.
Reading the Narrows
I've made countless SUP crossings of the Tacoma Narrows so far. The crossings themselves are only part of my interest in the place. After years of paddling around Gig Harbor, I became increasingly interested in what the tide and current predictions were actually describing.
The obvious temptation is to look up slack tide and treat that as the answer. The water is more complicated than that. Current varies across the Narrows, and nearby prediction stations do not reach slack at exactly the same time.
I eventually wrote a short technical paper about a way to organize those predictions. The model compares NOAA current predictions from three stations around the crossing. At each point in time it treats the strongest of those predicted currents as the limiting condition, rather than averaging them into a friendlier number. It then looks at whether the entire modeled out-and-back period fits around a common slack interval while remaining inside daylight and a configured current threshold.
The point is not to declare a crossing safe. It is to make the timing information easier to read while keeping the assumptions visible. The model does not account for everything that matters on the water: wind, waves, visibility, vessel traffic, wakes, local turbulence and the paddler are all outside or only partly represented by the calculation.
I put the current-timing output on a small site at swirlingvortexofdrama.com. The name is less restrained than the method. Underneath it is a fairly conservative question: given several current predictions around the route, when do they collectively describe the quietest usable part of the cycle?
For me, that is part of the same paddling history as the nights at Sunrise Beach and the hundreds of shorter trips around Gig Harbor. Experience came first, mostly by feel and repetition. The technical work came later, as a way of looking more closely at water I already knew well.
The national championship, the All Star and the Narrows project all landed in the same season, but they do not feel like separate subjects. They are different parts of the same long interest: paddling this particular stretch of Puget Sound, noticing how it moves, and continuing to learn what the water is telling me.