sup

On our last little shake down cruise to the Abacos, we were anchored at Double Breasted with our friends Tom and Andrea from Happy Healer. Tom Neilson is a local surfboard shaper and also makes some pretty awesome stand-up-paddle boards (SUP’s). They let us try out their paddle boards and we had a total blast. We were hooked and decided they would be better than the kayaks we were planning on taking. Still, last year we still ended up buying two little kayaks because the price for the two of them was about the price of just the paddles for the paddle boards. We thought we had ourselves a little score until we moved them out of the garage and onto the boat last week. Two little kayaks are still really big on a 35 foot sailboat. This was all the push we needed to give in to swapping them out for paddle boards-what we really wanted anyway and they will stow better.

Turns out Tom had one of his used ones for sale. He makes them with great cork decks, carbon fiber sides, and vents that you don’t have to adjust. This one is small enough for Keith to even surf on too. Of course, this makes it a bit more touchy than the big 12 foot boards. He did great though and didn’t even get wet once but paddling along in soda brown water just isn’t the same as being able watch all the fishes swim below as in the Bahamas. Soon.

We haven’t sold the kayaks yet so here is a quick inventory of what we have on deck at the moment: 2 kayaks, 2 dinghys, 1surfboard, 1paddleboard, 2 outboards, and a slew of Jerry cans. I’ll let you just try to picture that for a moment. It seems we still have some streamlining to do!