Notes From My Paddleboard

I spotted a battered wooden staircase descending along the rock face toward the shore while tooling around on my paddleboard. Like every hidden cove or strip of sandy beach along the coast of the Vermont island I was visiting, the stairway to nowhere became a treat for the eye while the arms and legs — my arms and legs — were busy navigating the water via paddleboard.

The staircase emerged one morning during a vacation on Lake Champlain; my family and I had rented a rustic cabin on a tiny, private island in the middle of the lake. Staying on a private island sounds fantastic, right? But it was the paddleboarding that I liked best.

The island ceased to be theoretical from my paddleboard: it transformed, before my eyes as I circumnavigated it, into the craggy rock with brilliantly irregular contours that it is, but which I would have otherwise only glimpsed a small part of.

I couldn't recall the last time I'd taken up a new sport, and on that Vermont island, I felt as though I was stealing away for a secret rendezvous every time I took off on my board. Two years prior, I had begun paddleboarding at the ripe old age of 44, during a great change in my life – early motherhood combined with a cross-country relocation from Georgia to Connecticut.

Arriving in New England from the blistering South, I threw myself into outdoor activities and took up paddleboarding. I was so thrilled with this new development that I gushed in my journal, "I paddle board now! I stand up on a board that looks like a surfboard and push water away with a paddle until I move forward." It now sounds painfully naïve, but it reflects the spirit of the eternal rookie.

While complementing older passions of mine like swimming, paddleboarding has given me a whole new way of seeing the world. As a short, petite woman, I have the right physique for paddle boarding; I can balance on the board with little effort, leaving me free to scour the shore for points of interest.

"Women have an easier time because their center of gravity is lower," confirmed Sue Warner, President of Collinsville Canoe and Kayak, about 20 miles east of Hartford, Connecticut. "For men with big, broad shoulders, it may take a little longer to get used to it." But anyone looking for a new way to explore should climb on a paddleboard. And the sport can be as easy, even lazy, as you want to make it.

I didn't know how to hold the paddle when I first tried it. At a demo on the Farmington River by Warner's shop in Collinsville, Connecticut, the paddleboard gear rep was friendly, and intrigued by this new activity, I'd pressed him for tips while handily exceeding the time limit for my trial. I was galvanized by the allure of logging some exercise and learning a new skill.

Paddleboarding offers full immersion. Imagine if every time you jogged, you felt as though you were uncovering a new world in addition to toning your legs and training your mind. In ordinary life, I am often in drive-by mode, seeing only the surfaces of things. On my board, I penetrate the interior when I detour under a small bridge and glide by the shores of a creek I'd never reach on foot or by car.

And not only — I am also immersed in the task, the way children frequently are, but adults often are not because once we get older, we typically cease learning new skills. Tom Vanderbilt wrote in "Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning" that adults must cultivate "the unencumbered beginner's mind." 

He did just that when he decided to learn chess in middle age. "One Sunday morning in a crowded room in New York City, I sat down to a chessboard with my heartbeat elevated and my stomach on the boil," he writes.

One day, I felt a similar focus during the early COVID lockdown when we paddled late in the afternoon after finishing work and school. My family and I arrived at a launch near our house just as the sun was browning the top of the water.

There was a moment of serendipity when bathed in the sun's warmth, I drank in a stately, historic brick home along the riverbank that seemed to float by me, unaware of all that was wrong with the world at that particular moment. I was reveling in something small — our escape from the backyard — while immersing myself in something genuinely immense: the Great Outdoors.

Little did I know I was part of a wave of interest in standup paddleboarding that began before the COVID pandemic. Indeed, in a sign of how mainstream the sport has gone, the International Surf Association advocates for its inclusion in the Olympics. The ease of accessibility to bodies of water has aided the sport's expansion. 

Participation statistics among recreational paddleboarders are difficult to obtain, but ISA cites the popularity of its World StandUp Paddle and Paddleboard Championship, launched in 2012. Contestants from 42 countries competed in the 2017 event, nearly tripling athlete participation in five years.

"Twenty-five years ago, we started with a smattering of paddleboards," Warner said while sitting outside her shop at a picnic table where customers fill out rental forms. "But now, at this time of year, it's a huge part of our business. The weather is warm and people want to be out on the water on a paddleboard."

Paddleboarding has a wide appeal; it's also open to — and popular with — dogs. That was one of the reasons Mikayla and Devin King began paddleboarding two years ago. They are part of a subset of paddleboarders who take to the water with canine companions. "We can't keep our dogs out of the water. They love it. They try to tip us over," Devin King, 26, said.

But it's not the only reason the Southington, Connecticut, couple likes to paddleboard. "The water is our happy place," Mikayla King, 25, said recently after a morning paddle on the Farmington River. While paddleboarding has only recently burst into the mainstream, the sport likely emerged from the surfing community in Hawaii.

As SUP World Mag notes, "In the 1940s, surf instructors in Waikiki like Duke Kahanamoku and Leroy and Bobby AhChoy would take paddles and stand on their boards to get a better view of the surfers in the water and incoming swells, and from time to time they would surf the waves themselves using the paddle to steer the board."

However, as the magazine also points out, forms of paddleboarding almost certainly predate this; for thousands of years, for example, Peruvian fishermen used small boats made of reeds that they steered with "a long bamboo shaft somewhat like an elongated kayak paddle."

When I return from an intense day of paddleboarding, my limbs mimic the rhythm I've developed hours after coming off the water. My body is listening to a distant call to move, to slice the water with a paddle, and to propel a board forward with my legs.

A word about my technique: I won't stand idly on the board and float along; I no longer wonder if I am doing it right. What feels right to me is bending my knees on each stroke while aggressively attacking the water with my paddle and exerting pressure on the board with my feet so that my legs contribute to the forward motion, like kayaking meets skateboarding, with a dash of cross-country skiing thrown in.

Most people, however, take a more relaxed stroke approach. As Mikayla King, the recreational paddler I met in Connecticut this month, pointed out, "You can kneel. You can sit." In my experience, recreational paddleboarding can't match the exertion required for marathon training or cycling, even at its most rigorous. But it's designed to do something else: combine water exercise with exploration.

I've always loved the water. When I was growing up, my grandparents lived on a small lake north of New York City; as a suburban Long Island child, I considered Peach Lake the countryside — and paradise.

When I was old enough, I would steal away to the lake in Grandpa's rowboat, working the cumbersome oars until I reached the dead center, often at sunset. I'd cease rowing and coast along, water on all sides of me. I was no more than a quarter-mile from my grandmother's front door but a world away. Paddleboarding has become a way for me to experience a destination intimately — even places I've been visiting for decades.

I rented a paddleboard while on vacation in Italy, where I'd lived as an ex-pat after college. I learned that paddling around the Adriatic Sea was harder than the staid rivers I knew back home in Connecticut and that the term for the board (surf or paddle) was "tavola," a word I'd only known as a table before. It made me hungry to paddle everywhere I've ever been — a way to rediscover my world.

On my list of must-paddleboard spots is my grandparents' lake in Westchester, New York. Sadly, they will no longer be there if I make it back. Still, I am almost giddy at what it will be like to marry these two worlds — to see the lake I loved as a child from atop my paddleboard, which is to say, seeing it anew.

Jeanne Bonner is a writer, editor and literary translator. She often teaches Italian to undergrads in Connecticut. She was a 2022 NEA Literature Fellow in Translation, who is translating the short stories of Edith Bruck, a transnational Italian author who survived the Holocaust. Her essays and reporting have been published by The New York Times, CNN, the Boston Globe and NPR. She blogs about her favorite Italian pastry – the ciambellina – and other passions at https://ciambellina.blogspot.com. Read More