I didn’t plan to buy a paddleboard. I’m a kayaker, not a SUPper, although I have been known to go out on a SUP or canoe for a bit of variety. I like a Sunday morning canoe paddle followed by an ice cream and there’s something about the simplicity of SUP that I find pleasing – but my heart is in the kayak.
However, realistically, I’m probably not ever going to buy my own kayak. I have nowhere to store it, I probably couldn’t fit it on my tiny car even if I was strong enough to lift it up on my own and I don’t think I could get it down to the beach at Studland. Besides, in my dreams, I want a full-length sea kayak and they cost really quite a lot of money. And so, inevitably, I found myself buying an inflatable paddleboard.
It fits in the car, I can heave it down to the water myself and I can practice the fine art of paddling with a single-ended paddle. There’s a stretch of river that’s popular with families, for all your splashing, inflatable and bridge-jumping desires – not that I’d ever recommend jumping off a bridge, especially given the sentence that’s about to follow. This stretch of river is relatively placid and very shallow – I soon learned that a couple of hundred metres upstream is a patch so shallow I have to jump off my board and tow it along, and even then the fin scrapes on the gravel. Further up, there’s another wide patch where you can easily enter the water and it’s only on the extreme left as you’re paddling up that’s it’s deep enough to stay on the board.
It’s a bit of a drive to hire a canoe or go out on the sea with a kayak, whereas thus river is only about a twenty-minute drive. I can spontaneously decide on nice summer evenings that I’m going out for an hour paddling on the river. Throw the board bag in the car, put on my filthy old grey t-shirt and swimming shorts, pack a drybag for my valuables and off I go.
It’s sometimes busy with families and kids enjoying the cold water on hot days but if you linger until the sun starts to go down, it always gets quieter. A few people with SUPs or inflatable boats will make their way up the river but most stay around the bridge, so with a bit of paddling, you can usually find some peace and quiet. And by quiet, I mean that I usually meet a heron wading in the river, which watches me warily from a distance and if I’m really lucky, I might see otters. Unfortunately, my GoPro doesn’t zoom so it’s very hard to take photos of them.
One day I’m going to paddle the two and a half miles to the pub, have the chocolate orange brownie and paddle back. I could do it in a kayak, easy peasy. But a SUP is a bit harder for me, and an hour bimbling around on the river on summer evenings is more than enough right now.
Bumblebee Paddles 