Pioneering Spirit
If you’ve ever been part of a new and growing sport, driven by aspirations of what ‘can be’ and what you would ‘rather be’ doing to the point of obsession, chances are you were very well by default, a pioneer, whose raw enthusiasm no doubt contributed, no matter how small, to the sum of the whole as the sport matured and morphed into it’s full blown form.
Be it skateboarding, windsurfing, surfing, outrigger canoeing, paddleboarding or surf ski paddling, they all began as a result of vision, more powerful than your basic idea, because a vision embraces an almost dreamlike, hypnotic state which drives you well beyond the simple premise of a singular idea. It is in short and emotional prism into which you dive into, open to all and every possibility. Whether a pioneering spirit is a product of your nature or as a result of your nurturing, one thing is for sure in the early days of most all equipment dependant sports, they begin life in rudimentary form, using whatever happens to be lying around the back yard or cluttering up the garage. For the most part, others devoid of such spirit, right you off as crazy, usually your parents.
When pioneering windsurfers in the early 80s such as Mike Waltz, Matt Schweitzer, Larry Stanley and Jurgen Honsheid were taming Maui’s Hookipa, saw the light and set aside their oversized, Windsurfer Rockets, frustrated with their lack of manoeuvrability and bone shattering landings, and simply resorted to grabbing their surfboards and converted them into wave-boards, merely by adding a single set of foot straps and a fin box to the deck, it’s true to say, at that exact point in time the degrees of separation between a pure surfboard and a wave board were three fifths of two thirds of nothing. They were in short, one and the same thing.
Stand up paddleboarding, by its very nature, seems for the most to have avoided such an exciting long evolutionary process. Within the space of a mere five years or so, the range of boards and paddles is staggering. The pioneering quest seems to have been fast tracked by a simple process of osmosis. This new sport, his supped from the plethora of existing equipment to hand. Tooling up for many existing surfboard, windsurfing or paddleboarding makers has it seems, been a relatively simple process; good for them and perhaps even better for the participant.
Contemporary innovative stand up paddleboarders in Hawaii simply used Longboards (Malibu Style ‘Tongue Depressors’) and outrigger canoe paddles. In a matter of a few days, paddles were lengthened to accommodate paddling in a standing position. The design and manufacturer of purpose made SUBs came later, first custom made the old way, shaped from a foam blank and glassed, then mass produced in epoxy.
In contrast the notion of using an old windsurfer falls into the category of being a functionally novel innovation open to all users however unfavorable to manufacturers. Such innovative action by the user qualitatively doing different things that could not be done previously with the board on account of perhaps removing the foot-straps and with the addition of a paddle creates a new and innovative functional capability.
I realise some folk have already figured this out, but I wonder why this has not been promoted more widely, accept for the obvious that manufacturers for one, may not want you to think outside the loop and magazines would by their need to generate advertising from such manufactures, would reserve judgement in promoting this idea. But the simple fact of the matter is, the more folk who get involved, regardless, will raise the sports profile and lead to benefits for all and unlike the early day of surfing or windsurfing, where equipment was cheap and essentially low-tech, I tend to feel that stand up paddleboarding has gone hi-tech and consequently expensive so fast as to make it almost unattractive to the person thinking of involvement.
Naturally, once the basics of paddling technique and balance have been mastered and importantly the body conditioned and strengthened, the paddler's developed skills and vision for which discipline they wish to pursue; surf or distance for example, can tap into the innovations and designs specifically suited to that discipline as produced by manufactures, where the interplay between equipment and technique becomes more critical.
Perhaps by way of sympathetic response to this, or sudden epiphany, some manufacturers now acknowledge that what they thought was reasonable by way of cost as an entry-level board, has in fact proven to be unpalatable to many would be newcomers. Whilst a response to address this issue is a good thing, there is still merit in recycling some long board windsurfers costing your average newcomer next to nothing; their initial investment being in a good quality paddle as against over purchasing on the board and buying a cheap stick to paddle it with.