Our First Paddle Board

My wife, Zoe has been bugging me for the past year about a paddle board. She wanted one so bad and she had been getting on my nerves a wee bit. Every turn of every corner I’d have to hear about how she wanted one. I knew they were expensive, and more importantly where the heck were we going to store that gigantic nautical item. I had grown up with plenty of surfboards but even my long boards paled in comparison to the overall size of a paddle board. Most surfboards are meant to float a human being but only while he or she is moving in front of a powerful wave. The more powerful (ie: bigger) the wave the shorter the board actually needs to be. A paddle board on the other hand has to be designed to fully support a person’s weight when the board is not moving at all. This you see requires a much bigger board. Yep back to that same old concern of mine: where are we going to store it?

So I finally broke down yesterday. I left my workplace as fast as I could and picked up Zoe. We headed to a shop on the Connecticut shoreline that sold paddle boards and just about anything else used in the water. We made it to the shop just before closing. The sales assistant was super nice and very helpful. They had a lot of boards but my wife was interested in the Evolve Brand SUPs that they had to offer. They pretty much were in the sales of a yoga board and an all around general purpose board. After talking it over we figured that doing yoga on the board would definitely be the primary use case of the paddle board so she decided to go with other board.

I ended up purchasing her a Paddiliac by Evolve. At 10 foot 4 inches this board was more than big enough to support my little wife.

So there we were, standing in the gravel parking lot of the shop which was conveniently located on a narrow inlet that lead out to the Long Island Sound. Our choices were narrow. We could through the board in the back of my truck and head back home, fighting traffic the entire time because it was now rush hour… or … we could test out that shiny new board. Uh yep, we choose the latter.

I carried the brand new paddilac to the water’s edge along a boating dock and placed it in the water carefully. Zoe climbed into the board starting on her knees and once she was a safe distance away from the dock she stood up with no problems what so ever! There she was smiling and paddling. Boy did she look happy, which made me happy. I yelled to her and told her to take her time, if not, we were only going to be sitting it rush hour traffic. She spend about an hour and a half paddling around on the board before coming back to the same spot she launched from.   She had paddled so far down that inlet I could hardly see her at one point.

My only regret was not bringing bug spray! Man those suckers were eating me alive. Regardless I was super happy to everything worked out. We tied up the board in back of my pickup truck and headed home, tired and happy.

I’m going to have to figure out a better way to tie this board in, I was a wee bit nervous and found myself checking the rear view mirror too often while driving home.   I was afraid to see a brand new paddle board laying in the highway behind me, but everything made it home safe and sound.