Before dawn broke over the Pacific on December 11, 15-year-old Axel Wright was already on his way to the open ocean. By sunrise, he was in the water, paddling alone on a prone board off the coast of Santa Cruz Island — the silhouette of Ventura a distant blur across 22 miles of glassy, rain-cleared sea.
Seven and a half hours later, Wright pulled up to Ventura Harbor, exhausted and salt-crusted and having raised, as of Thursday, more than $8,100 for DignityMoves, a Santa Barbara nonprofit dedicated to ending homelessness.
“It took seven and a half hours, and it was 22 miles,” Wright said in an interview. “I was on a prone board. I’m a big surfer, so I decided that I was gonna do something like this, and this was the right thing to do.”…