Paddle Boards and Prats

My father used to do a lot of windsurfing in his younger years, so he has watched our progress with paddle boarding with great interest and eventually expressed an interest to give it a go.

With temperatures remaining high, we decided to forgo sitting in a sweaty leisure centre watching The Youngest swim and traded it for another evening on Coniston, paddle boarding, jumping off jetties (main) and sitting lake side with a picnic and watching them both swim in the open water.

Grandad was encouraged onto the board with the wee ones providing both useful hints and tips as well as making it abundantly clear that they really hoped he would fall in. They would eventually get their wish as he lost balance and tumbled off backwards, but not before I too had ended up in the drink. I’m still not entirely sure what happened as I wasn’t even standing up at that point, but into the soup I went. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

I’m pleased to report though that Grandad did get to a point where he was standing up (extra) and it was on fairly choppy (for paddle boarding) waters that he did so.

We were having a lovely evening right up until the point that two cars pulled up loaded with loud, sweary, uncouth youths bearing an untrained dog and decided to site themselves next to us. Fortunately, it wasn’t far from packing-up time for us anyway, so we beat a hasty retreat and I vowed never to park near the jetty again.

Other than that it was a cracking evening and hopefully a nice precursor to my father’s **th birthday tomorrow!