Practice in the Pond

A weekend or two back, while A was at the solid sound concert, which for the record she thoroughly enjoyed, mom, N, and myself camped out about 45 minutes away in Vermont. It was fun camping, I think we should do it more often, and if you can believe this, we brought along our surfboards. Now this is a little kooky but I strapped the boards to the roof and brought them along because I wasn't really sure what we were going to do all day at the campground, and the simple reality is, we need practice on our boards. Surfing and shredding waves is a bit farther in the distant future. For now, we just need to get comfortable on our boards.

We noticed this first hand when we hit the waves a couple weeks back - just paddling and sitting are not a given. This is especially true when you're not only getting bounced around by the waves, but are busy paddling for your life to get outside of the sets. And the waves weren't even that big!

So I came up with this idea - since waves are hard to come by, but bodies of water are aplenty, why not make the most of the situation and take the boards out on a lake? Sure, it's a little kooky, but considering that we need practice in just being comfortable on the board, which includes paddling and sitting, all we really need is water. I recall when I was first starting out I had this old and indestructible board. I took it into our pool and practice standing on it. The board would shoot out and hit the side of the pool, but since it was an indestructible junker, it didn't matter. Just practicing the motion of standing on a board is helpful. It's very difficult to stand when the board is still, so once you're on an actual wave it will be that much easier. At least that's how the theory goes.

So we strapped the boards onto the roof of the fit and headed out to Bennington, where we camped. I forgot the name of the campgrounds but it was a VT state park. It was very nice, and busy, to boot. The ranger said they were full for that weekend, and you could tell that the campsites were full. Though we got slammed by the weather, we did manage to suit up and paddle out. Since it was a lake we didn't need our full suits and went with spring suits, which are much easier to put on. We then paddled out and practiced all of our needs. I think it's a great idea, and a good workout, as well.

It was kind of funny driving around VT and MA with surfboards on the roof, but who cares? As long as it gets us to where we need to be, that's all that matters.

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Until the next time, thanks for reading, and thanks to Peter Sandstrom for the pic.