When did you first come across
stand up paddle boarding? Did you
think it looked cool?
Got any fond memories of your time
stand up paddling so far?
Plenty! Enjoyed a couple of fantastic
winters developing our original range of
SUP and short SUPs in Fuerteventura in
2012/13. I regularly shared waves with
Iballa Moreno, Olivia Piana, Stephane
Etienne, Erik Terien and many other pro
water folk before they could actually do
any ‘proper turns’. It certainly brought my
SUP surfing on in leaps and bounds.
It was through windsurfing that I got
introduced to SUP, which lead to me
setting up one of the first dedicated SUP
schools in the UK. Not sure it looked ‘cool’
and I certainly copped some grief for
starting a scene up here in the North East.
That said, I thought SUP had great
potential for bigger waves – which I
thoroughly tried out in my first year of
ownership. Nothing like a couple of near
drownings to test the limits..
I’ve also spent some quality time in
Morocco and its right hand reefs slap a big
smile on your face as you
throw buckets off
the top. It’s
cheap and
friendly over
there too
which always
helps.
Where did you first learn to SUP?
100% self-taught. I was catching waves in
less than 30mins from a standing start. It
felt familiar to ‘surfing’ a larger windsurfer
i.e easy to catch waves and impossible to
turn without ‘very deliberate’ footwork. We
all just watched YouTube videos from
Hawaii and tried to emulate the guys with
varying degrees of success.
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