Blog #17 – Lovin’ Summer!

So there goes another week in this amazing summer of SUP! It’s been a scorcher – and we’ve definitely been making the most of it with SUP Club proving super-popular every Wednesday evening, SUP lessons filling up at weekends, plus various trips away, races, socials and more besides…

Last week started hot and stayed that way, albeit with a fair amount of easterly airflow, which meant we had to head back to the river for SUP Club. We opted for Hoe Mill Lock as that north-easterly breeze would allow us our first trip up to Beeleigh Lock and back this season – and we had another great turn-out of 25 enjoying the 7k loop before dinner outdoors at the Six Bells Boreham.

Then we moved into SUP school mode – on Thursday we took a father and (grown-up!) son out at Paper Mill Lock for a private lesson. Both of them did superbly and they’ve already bought boards, so we’re looking forward to welcoming them to SUP Club this summer. Then on Saturday we were back to Hoe Mill Lock where a lovely group of women were camping in their motorhomes for the weekend and had booked themselves a private Learn to SUP session. Finally Sunday saw us back to Papermill for a pair of sold out scheduled BSUPA Ready to Ride lessons – and some really strong paddling from 13 new recruits, including a great team of CrossFit pals and a couple celebrating their 18th wedding anniversary. Awesome work from everyone! Spaces are filling fast, but we do still have limited spaces available to book onto courses throughout July and August (including 11am this Saturday 7th) via www.supsect.com/learn-to-sup

Now we’re looking ahead and thinking about racing again, as today entries opened for one of our season highlights – the British SUP Club Championships at Bray Lake in late September. We’ve already got a team of 20+ entered, and have just heard that team sizes may be capped hence it’s unlikely we can recruit many more. So now as we’re committed, we will be starting Race Club this Friday evening and continuing every Friday evening until September – this is open and free to everyone coming to Bray plus anyone else interested in adding power, strength and speed to their paddling. If you want to keep informed of plans then, at least to start with, we’ll probably just be posting in the SUPsect Forum on Facebook.

But before that, our ever-popular non-racy social SUP Club continues as usual on Wednesday evening – and this week it’s looking like it’s a little less windy, but still a noticeable easterly breeze, so we’re currently thinking it might be a straight repeat of last week: maybe a 7pm launch from Hoe Mill, heading east to Beeleigh for a 7k loop, before dinner back at the Six Bells? Still to be decided, so stay tuned to our Facebook page and the SUP Club #15 event right here for a heads-up tomorrow – and then the full and final call as usual on Wednesday.

See you soon!