Stand up and paddleboard!
BY TARA HAMILTON
I saw it first about three years ago, sitting at home browsing the Internet for information on surfing. In a top corner of a Mexican surf school webpage, an athletic girl in a black bikini, standing on a board in blue water. But she wasn’t surfing; she was
holding a long paddle and paddling into the sunset like she had no cares in the world. I wanted to be her, and I wanted to learn how to handle an SUP (Stand Up Paddleboard). At the time, learning how to surf
was on my “before 30” bucket list. Research was fine, but as a resident of the Gatineau Hills, I had a challenge to actually learn it without travelling. But with the black- bikinied woman in mind, I bought my first SUP last summer. There’s a lot of similarity between a standard surfboard and an SUP. A surfboard relies on the moving water tension of the wave to allow the user to stand on it. An SUP board has more
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volume to allow the user to stand on it in flat water. Past that, they share shapes, fin setups and the like. Now as a SUP owner/paddler
working in an outdoors shop I get the customers who ask, “Why paddleboard? I just don’t get it.” The answer requires a basic understanding of where the sport came from. Stand up paddleboarding has been gaining popularity since the early 2000s with the help of famous surfers like Laird Hamilton. Hamilton and others used SUPs for training on days when the waves were small, but now they paddle the boards in big waves and push the boundaries of surf SUP. Since then, the sport
has been growing not just in ocean waves, but on flat water, whitewater, in recreational paddling, racing and tour paddling. Now, back to that girl paddling off
into the sunset. It’s not just fantasy to lose the worries of your day as you dip your paddle further away from shore or grin from ear to ear as you surf your SUP on the standing wave at Bate Island. Stand up paddleboarding is a mini vacation, free from suits and skirts into board shorts and bikinis. And it can be a fantastic workout.
It involves your whole body, especially your core. It boosts your stability muscles. All in all it’s an exciting way to train, or shed some kilos out on the water.
SUPing has no limiting boundaries or expectations of what a paddler should be or look like. Land-locked surfers can keep up on board skills, and it’s a fallback for windsurfers
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PHOTOS BY STAND UP FOR CHEO
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