I’ve had half an eye on getting myself a stand up paddleboard for a while – well, let’s go for plain paddleboard here; I can’t stand up on the things. They’re not my first love – that would be the kayak. I like the double-bladed paddle that lets me just charge through the water, fight the waves and the current and control the boat as if it’s an extension of my body. But it’s not practical to own one. I have nowhere to store it and I also have a car that’s only eleven and half feet long. I can’t find a number for the length of the roof but even a small kayak would be precarious up there and the seventeen-foot sea kayak of my dreams would be ludicrous, not to mention costing me somewhere in the region of £1,250. An inflatable paddleboard is much more practical.
But even those… the cheapest one Decathlon does that looks like it would support my weight is £199 and once you leave the realms of basic Decathlon kit, you’re looking at anywhere from £250 up to actual insanity. I hired a board for an hour on a shallow lake when the first lockdown was lifted. It’s by Red, which claims to make the best boards in the world – and I believe them, except that their absolute cheapest all-round non-specialist beginner board starts at £999.
I didn’t want to pay that much. If I was a big paddleboard fan and would use it a lot for some reasonably specialist paddling, maybe. Not the Red one, obviously! I’d still be going for the absolute lowest end of the price spectrum but I’m not a big paddleboard fan and I’m not ready to spend that much, so – rather to my shame – I took to Amazon. Once I’d wrestled with the ads and the Prime and the fact that you get all the accessories and replacement parts for the first few hundred pages when you sort by price, I came across the Caroma board.
Now, you do have to be careful with the colours and the length. I went for a normal 10′ board in red which cost £165. Still a lot but just about the cheapest board I’d found that wasn’t meant specifically for youths or children. But for some reason, if I’d bought the same board in Deep Ocean, it would have been £220 and the Light Blue only £150 – to be honest, I hadn’t noticed that the price fluctuated with the colour, otherwise I’d have got the Light Blue! Glad I didn’t accidentally pitch on the Deep Ocean! The 10’6″ version varies from £166 to £250 depending on colour and I kind of wish I’d got the extra six inches for just an extra pound.
It came in a huge box and I hauled the stuff out all over the floor. A big backpack that apparently fits all the stuff you need. An orange pot containing a few bits and pieces that apparently form a repair kit. A detachable fin. An ankle leash. A hand pump. A paddle in three parts. And of course, the board itself.
Before I took it out on the water, I wanted to try inflating it at home using the electric pump in my car. Scuppered at the first post! It doesn’t have a suitable adaptor! So I resorted to the hand pump and actually, that was pretty easy. It takes 250-280 pumps, depending on how well you empty it afterwards and although I haven’t timed it, it’s well under ten minutes for me. You’re supposed to get the board to 13-15 PSI and there’s a pressure gauge on top of the pump to help. Frankly, I can’t get anywhere near that but when I just can’t get any more air in, it seems rigid enough.
The paddle was more of a problem. I could clip the paddle section into the middle section but when I slotted the handle bit into the middle section, it just slid out again. There’s a clip that’s meant to pull it tight which you can loosen to adjust it before clipping it up again but the clip did nothing. I wrestled for quite some time before I discovered that when the clip is open, you can turn it like a key to tighten or loosen the top and then you can clip it tightly into place.
So that very evening I took it out on the river. Emily Luxton had recommended Eyebridge at Wimborne and that did seem like a better idea that going all the way out to Studland for my maiden voyage on the open sea. I waited until gone 7pm because on the hottest day this country has ever known, I knew it would be chaos down there and it’s only a small car park. It turns out it’s also got two overflow car parks so although the main car park was full, there was plenty of room in the overflows. I parked, pumped up my board, slotted in the fin and locked it into place, put my keys, phone and wallet into a dry bag and clipped it to the elastic storage space on the front and then went down to the water.
It’s quite a big fin so you need to take the board a bit further out than you might expect before you can sit on it. I sat. Despite not being fully inflated to the recommended pressure, it felt absolutely solid. I took off my Croc-a-likes and slotted them under the elastic, pushed myself out until I actually needed to paddle and adjusted the grip on the paddle.
I’m not expert enough to properly review this board but it seems to do everything I wanted. It’s easy to inflate, even by hand, it’s solid and rigid enough to sit on, it goes pretty smoothly as long as you avoid the really shallow bits and it’s got the aforementioned elastic for storing stuff. It does make a slight rustling noise from the front that make me worry it was scraping over something but it’s not – no idea why. Maybe I’d picked up a bit of weed, maybe what I was actually hearing was my bare arm scraping against my buoyancy aid as I paddled or maybe it’s just the sound of water against the board. It also doesn’t have rings for attaching a kayak seat but as that’s something I’d never imagined being a thing only a month or so ago, I’d not overly bothered. If I had a kayak seat, I’d want a double-ended paddle anyway.
Overall, I can’t think of any reason for a beginner like me to pay more for a paddleboard. I spent an evening on the river – saw a heron, like a great big awkward dinosaur bird picking its way through the shallows under the trees, saw dozens of dragonflies (or maybe damselflies; they went past far too quickly for me to tell) and even an otter. I’d gone a certain distance up the river and returned to the bridge when a couple in an inflatable kayak towing a badly-inflated rubber boat came paddling down to tell their kids they’d been watching an otter. So off I went. It looked far too big to be an otter, this big brown head that poked out, and then all its feet as it floated on its back before diving, vanishing for a minute and then repeating the entire performance. I wish I’d had my good camera with a zoom because you can hardly see it on the GoPro but in real life, when I first spied it in the distance, I took it for a dog.
At last I came ashore, carried my board back to my car and deflated it. I’ve not quite mastered deflating – when you first press the valve, it hisses in your face like you’ve unleashed some kind of wind demon to end the world and then it slows down and you have to fold it and lean on it and sit on it. Trouble is, you can’t just roll it from the other end because my arms aren’t long enough to press the valve on the back end while holding onto the front end. So I have to sprawl on it in a public car park until it’s flat enough to fold in half and then sit on again. I was also far too lazy to pack it into its bag when I could just bundle it up and dump it on my back seat. When it has to come into the house, it’ll have to be properly packed away. The fin is a bit of a pain – I can’t unlock the locking pin thing with my bare hands so I needed a key to push it down and remove it. I considered just leaving the fin in place but then I’ll snap it when I lean on the board to flatten it. Very minor complaint.
So I’ll be spending plenty more evenings and weekends on the river, and maybe on the sea, this summer, on my cheap and basic board. After all, when I do my FSRT, it’s a general paddle qualification that covers canoes and paddleboards as well as kayaks so it’s not a bad thing to get accustomed to paddling with a single blade, besides the plain fun of messing around on the river.