The Sunday Naples Island's Canals Become a Racecourse

Walk the Rivo Alto Canal on most mornings and the water does what it has done for over a century: it sits still, reflects the red tile roofs, and holds the gondolas steady enough for a photo. On the morning of Sunday, August 16, 2026, it does something else. Around 9 a.m., swimmers who registered months ago will cut a counter-clockwise line through that same canal, past docks and pool decks, as part of the Naples Island Swim.

If you live here, you already know the race happens. What's easy to miss, even after a few Augusts in the neighborhood, is that the canal itself is the course. Not the bay out front, not the stadium down the road. The actual water your house backs up to becomes, for about an hour, a lane.

The Water Wasn't Built to Be Scenery

Naples wasn't a beach that got a marina bolted on. It was marshland in Bixby Slough that developer Arthur Parsons and his Naples Land Company turned into three islands and a canal system starting in 1903, using money raised in part through financier Henry Huntington. The pitch at the time was a Southern California version of Venice, and the company's own marketing called it the "Dreamland of Southern California." The islands weren't finished until the 1920s.

The open water swimming here is nearly as old as the islands themselves. The Naples Island Swims describes itself as a competition that began in 1903, the same year Parsons started moving earth around the slough. People were swimming this water before most of the canals around them existed in their current form.

That matters for how the neighborhood works today. The canals were engineered to be calm and enclosed, which is exactly what makes them swimmable in a way the open Pacific a few blocks away isn't. It's also what makes them workable for a gondola, which is a separate tradition that showed up decades later and never left.

What's Actually Happening This Sunday

For residents planning around race day, the logistics are set and mostly locked.

That last line is worth sitting with if you were thinking about jumping in on a whim. The event's own registration page is explicit that there is no race-day sign-up, and organizers close registration once they hit capacity to keep the event manageable on a residential canal. If you didn't register weeks ago, your role this Sunday is spectator, not swimmer.

The event has also picked up outside recognition that's easy to miss if you're not following competitive open water swimming. It was named one of the World's Top 100 Island Swims in 2019 by the World Open Water Swimming Association, and it's now part of the Southern Pacific Masters Swimming Open Water Series, which pulls in swimmers training well beyond Long Beach city limits.

The Course Runs Through Your Canal, Not Marine Stadium

A common mix-up, even among people who've lived here a while, is confusing this race with Marine Stadium, the rowing venue on the other side of Naples Island that was built for the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. Marine Stadium hosts its own rowing and paddling events, but it isn't part of the Naples Island Swim course.

The 1-mile route, for example, sends swimmers straight out past the tip of Treasure Island, then left into the Rivo Alto Canal for a full counter-clockwise loop. Coming back around toward Treasure Island, they take a right turn into the bay, then one more left to the finish. The course is marked by buoys for sighting only, not for steering, which means the swimmers are navigating by the same bridges and docks you pass on an evening walk.

Water temperature is the other variable most residents don't track closely, because most of us aren't getting in past our ankles. Summer water along the Long Beach coast and Los Alamitos Bay generally runs in the low to upper 60s Fahrenheit, and it can swing three or four degrees in a couple of days. USA Swimming's cold-water threshold for open water competition is 60.8 degrees, and if the bay dips below that, organizers either shorten the distances or call off the affected races entirely. It's a small detail, but it explains why an August race in Southern California isn't a lock for warm-water conditions the way the calendar might suggest.

The Parking Problem Locals Already Know

Parking around the swim is free, which is more than you can say for a lot of Long Beach events, but it gets tight fast. The area near 2nd Street and the finish line fills early on warm, sunny mornings even in a normal week, and race day adds a swim community that shows up hours ahead of the 9 a.m. start.

If your block is within a few streets of the bay side of 2nd, plan to leave the car where it is and walk. If you're hosting guests who want to watch, tell them to arrive before 8.

If You're Not Racing

Not everyone on the island wants to be in the water or standing on a curb watching people who are. The neighborhood has quieter options that run on their own schedule, race or no race.

• Mother's Beach, on Naples Island itself, stays calm and flat with lifeguards posted during peak periods, plenty of parking, and a grassy area that makes it the easier choice with small kids in tow.
• Colonnade Park, a 0.2-acre strip on the south end of The Colonnade, was actually a canal until the 1933 Long Beach earthquake destroyed the original wooden seawalls. It was rebuilt as concrete between 1937 and 1939 and filled in as a road and small park rather than restored as a waterway. Night lighting was added in 2008, and it's open from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., which makes it a solid pick for an evening walk once the race crowd has cleared out.
• Bella La Fontana di Napoli, the fountain at the center of the island, has gone through three names since 1933 before settling on its current one in 1971. It remains a low-key meeting spot a block from the bay, good for the kind of quiet Sunday evening that has nothing to do with a starting gun.

The Other Boat on the Water

The same canal that turns into a racecourse on Sunday morning turns into something else most evenings of the year. Gondola Getaway has been running Venetian-style cruises through the Rivo Alto Canal since 1982, when founder Michael O'Toole, who grew up in Naples, built the business out of a school project at USC. His boats are scaled down from the 37-foot Italian originals to 25 feet, sized specifically to fit both his storage facilities and the canal itself. The standard cruise runs 50 to 55 minutes and loops the same water the swimmers cover in under an hour, just at a fraction of the pace.

It's an odd pairing when you say it out loud: competitive open water swimmers and a couple on a gondola sharing the same hundred yards of canal, sometimes within the same week. But it only works because the water was built for exactly this kind of double duty, protected enough to race in and calm enough to be romantic in, more than a century after Parsons first pitched the idea to investors.

If you already live on the island, none of this changes your Sunday plans much. You'll route around 2nd Street, maybe watch the swimmers pass your dock, and probably still take a walk past Colonnade Park once the buoys come down. If you're newer to the neighborhood, or you're weighing whether this rhythm is one you want to plan a life around, the Rogina Group spends more time than most talking about the actual texture of Long Beach's coastal neighborhoods, not just their listing prices. Call or text if you want to talk about what a Naples Island summer looks like beyond the one Sunday everyone already knows about.