The Perils of Paddleboarding

               “I have never seen someone fall off a board more than you,” Jim Brugman told my blushing self.  Brugman is a surfer, skater, and gifted instructor at Middletown’s Island Surf and Sport.  With nearly two dozen surfboards, boogieboards, skimboards, and Stand-Up Padlleboards, Brugman has transformed a surf bum lifestyle into a busy career.  And while he usually spends fourteen-hour summer days teaching, facilitating, or officiating at Surfer’s End, he spent a futile afternoon attempting to get this oafish reporter balanced on a paddleboard.  Brugman’s young sun-scorched instructors assisted the numerous and diverse patrons (ages 7-70) while he drove me to Third Beach’s stiller waters.  After all, to Jim I was a fresh fish. 

Admittedly, I left Middletown in shame, but I had arrived with confidence.  A former lifeguard, a once-decorated captain of a swim team, I am, in sum, a waterbug.  Surely, I thought, pedagogue Brugman would have a dull time with Poseidon as his pupil. 

                Jim produced two boards. My thick blue paddleboard was nine and a half feet, though boards vary in sizes.  I placed my size fifteen hooves on this baby of a paddleboard and felt the high-density plastic rock beneath my feet.  Brugman modeled how to bend the knees (to mere mortals this gives balance) and keeping the chin tipped upward (a haughty move which would come easily). I was handed a paddle.  To fit my lengthy torso, its extendable was stretched to the limit.  The ideal paddler dips the blade alongside the board and sweeps backward before swapping hands and doing likewise on the opposite side.  I eyed Jim’s slimmer, sleeker board.  It would be my promotion if I could survive this first round of simple stand-and-paddle.

                With a push and an exclamation my baby board and I were off!  And though it handled like a combine, the ole’ girl was steady.  Jim’s paddle sliced through the water; I successfully mimicked these movements and held in my unsubtle paunch for Mercury’s clicking camera.  Beside me, I saw aged windsailors and other lazy paddlers.  With such mellow company, I demanded a rush.  “Jim, I need the open water!”  The instructor agreed.    

               Jim said that the Atlantic never had calmer waves than the day I took his board into Surfer’s End.  So, it is not with a little shame that I admit that even with such pygmy waves, I tumbled off like a pickled cyclist.  I collapsed sixteen times before I stood up once.  Each time I stood tall, at the slightest movement, I felt the need to rinse and repeat.  After the sixteenth dousing, miraculously, I could briefly stand.  I regained the vertical with verve but lasted a mere five minutes.  By collapse number twenty-six, I took a hint.

This vanquished paddler headed for shore and saw a mother—in the mid-afternoon of life, surfing by me with a smile.  It turns out that she was a true natural.  To my added disgrace, both she and her skilled son (Jim offered him a job) came from a land–locked state and took to the boards like a fish to—No!  I’ll just call them lucky.  Keep the boards waxed, Jim.  I’ll be back.