How the SUP went from novelty beach toy to adventurers’ best friend

About 400mn years ago, give or take an epoch or two, the Laurentia and Baltica tectonic plates collided to create a large fault line which now cuts across the Scottish Highlands. Some time later, giant glaciers carved out the Great Glen, a valley that runs along the fault in an inky slash of water that includes lochs deep enough to accommodate mythical monsters.

Fast forward another 10,000 years, and a man with a desk jockey’s stoop and growing blisters is navigating that entire diagonal passage. Others have completed the Great Glen Way on canoes and tourist boats. Walkers follow paths along the water. I’m also on my feet, as the woefully inexperienced pilot of a glorified lilo. 

It’s late September and I’m joining around 40 hardy paddlers as part of the annual Great Glen Challenge. I have two days to travel the 57-mile route across Scotland aboard a 13ft inflatable stand-up paddleboard, from Inverness on the east coast to Fort William, at the foot of Ben Nevis.

Fuelled by flapjacks and a spirit of adventure, I will cruise along glassy canals, traverse wind-whipped lochs and gaze up at the first colours of autumn. As I engage my body in an unfamiliar standing stroke, there will be moments on Loch Ness when I decide an encounter with a beast from the deep would come as blessed relief.

For more than a decade, stand-up paddleboards (SUPs) have proliferated on beaches, lakeshores and river banks. In certain seaside towns, the sound of violently deflating boards has come to mark the start of summer. Now, after the pandemic boom in outdoor pursuits, an intrepid core of leisure paddlers are lifting their horizons.

“So many thousands of people have got in at the ground floor over the past five years, and now we’re seeing them realising that this is a real sport,” says John Hibbard, a British former windsurfing champion and SUP pioneer.

Hibbard first tried paddleboarding in 2006, when hard fibreglass boards had appeared in surfing circles as a way to reach breaks. Paddling flat water with his wife and friends, he began to realise SUP’s social potential. When he spotted an early inflatable board that performed terribly but could be rolled up and shoved in a car boot, he was convinced he could fill a gap in the market.

Hibbard founded Red Paddle Co in 2008. Sixteen years later, the Devon-based firm has sold more than 200,000 inflatable boards. Almost half have been all-round leisure models, but the company, which had sales of £20mn last year, tells me its fastest growing range is now its longer, stiffer, narrower “touring” boards, which look and feel more like little boats than rafts.

Hibbard had always aspired to do more than pootle on a board. In 2009, he shocked old-schoolers by showing up at the historic, 125-mile Devizes to Westminster canoe marathon on a stand-up board. “No one had ever seen a paddleboard,” he says. “Nobody thought I’d even finish.” He did, only for the organisers to then ban SUPs. In a sign of where the sport is now going, next year’s event will include a SUP category for the first time. It will join a growing roster of races and group adventures all over the world. The Great Glen is among the most famous. I’ve been warned it’s also one of the toughest.

It’s not yet 6am, and still dark, when I pump up the board Hibbard has lent me. After a five-mile cruise out of Inverness along the smooth Caledonian Canal, a feat of Victorian engineering that links the Great Glen’s lochs to create a navigable route across Scotland, I float nervously into Loch Ness. At 23 miles long and up to 1.7 miles wide, it feels as intimidating to me as an ocean. 

Low clouds hug the mountains on either side of me. The peat-dark loch is still calm but a light rippling gradually builds as a breeze pushes the water along like black silk across a table. At the seven-mile mark, I’m already paddling into the unknown, having never matched that distance before. My back and shoulders are already complaining. As seasoned SUPers disappear ahead of me, I will spend the rest of the event largely alone.

At times it feels as if I’m going nowhere, like I’m raking a bottomless pile of leaves. Dropping to my knees briefly to grab a sandwich and some ibuprofen from the waterproof bag strapped to my board, I try to remember why I signed up for this.

It was only in June that I began to see SUPs as more than beach toys. With a morning to kill at an Austrian lakeside hotel, I found myself paddling to the town on the opposite shore. Something appealed to me about standing itself, as well as the rhythmic, almost meditative exertion.

At the same time, Instagram had been throwing up images of a new breed of SUP adventurers. Bart de Zwart, a Dutch-born Hawaiian, had paddled among icebergs in Greenland. More recently, a team from New Zealand and Switzerland navigated the Madre de Dios river in the Peruvian Amazon. Casper Steinfath had crossed the strait between Norway and his native Denmark. Cal Major had paddled the length of Britain, from Land’s End to John O’Groats. Meanwhile Sam Garthwaite, a bearded Scot who goes by “frothySUP” on social media, was throwing himself down wild rapids. 

Brendon Prince, a former PE teacher from Torquay in Devon, was a white water kayaker and surfer when he first tried an early hard SUP in 2007. “Everyone was, like, ‘look at that strange man standing up’, but it was the standing that I loved,” he tells me in late October. “Suddenly your vision is elevated and you can see further but also below you. At this time of year I’m seeing dolphins and baby seals.”

In 2019, Prince quit teaching to circumnavigate the British Isles in 2021, a feat nobody had been mad enough to attempt. Sleeping in a support van, and travelling clockwise over 2,500 miles and 141 days, he paddled alone, often 20 miles offshore as he journeyed between headlands. He enjoyed encounters with curious fishermen, dolphins, killer whales and humpbacks. “I went across the Firth of Forth in the fog and could just hear whale song the whole time,” he says.

Prince, 51, is also a private guide with a growing waiting list. He has taken clients around the Isle of Wight, down the River Dart and up the Welsh coast. He did the Great Glen in four days this summer, carrying a tent on his board. “People are saying, ‘I want an adventure, I want to go around headlands, I want to experience all of it,’” he says.

After coming across a film about last year’s Great Glen Challenge by Jamie Harman, Red Paddle Co’s brand manager, I rashly signed up with just two months to train. Harman gave me a lesson near his home in Devon. I visited Bewl Water, a reservoir near London, completed a seven-mile loop of the Thames and the canal in Oxford, and paddled off the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. I binged YouTube instructional videos. But as I flew to Inverness, I had no more than 30 miles under my feet.

After five hours on my board, Fort Augustus, a town in the middle of the Great Glen, is still way out of sight at the far end of Loch Ness. After resolving to tune out a chorus of aches and numbing toes, I fall into a steady, mind-freeing rhythm. The forests to the west pass in a slow-moving smudge of green. Soon the waves begin to crest as the breeze builds against my back. In the days before, I had lost sleep over my fear of falling in and being alone in cold open water; hypothermia is the biggest threat to Great Glen paddlers.

Risks can be greater at sea and, this summer, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution and HM Coastguard warned British paddlers to be better prepared after reporting a tripling in rescues between 2019 and 2023. “People get caught out because it’s so easy to get started,” says Prince, who in 2017 founded Above Water, a charity that aims to improve education around water safety. A lifeguard himself, Prince takes a rope when he paddles off Torbay in summer to rescue beginners caught out by offshore winds. “I towed five people back in one day this summer,” he says.

There’s a support boat on Loch Ness, but for the rest of the course I must be able to support myself. My compulsory kit includes a buoyancy aid, a waist leash, a GPS tracker, a foil blanket, a whistle, and a waterproof phone pouch. Today at least, I’m relieved that the waves, while bigger than anything I’ve encountered, don’t defeat me. At last Fort Augustus comes into view. Stepping off my board after just over eight hours on the water — six of them on Loch Ness — I hobble to my hostel via a towering plate of fish and chips.

Day two involves long canal stretches and two smaller lochs: Oich (four miles long) and Lochy (10 miles). I start briskly at dawn. Yellowing leaves hang like jewels in the beech trees. Bracken fronds dip into the still water. I’m enjoying the novel luxury of hours away from screens and routines as I marvel at the Highlands scenery.

But as I push off into Loch Lochy, it becomes quickly clear that this will be my biggest test. The sides of the glen steepen here, funnelling the wind and creating waves that seem to break in all directions. Experienced paddlers learn how to surf these waves. I’m just trying to stay upright. Determined to use the wind to push me along faster, I charge into the loch’s exposed centre. My board pitches forward and back while, without warning, simultaneously yawing like the needle of a crazed compass. I try to flex my knees, flattening my paddle blade in the water to stabilise myself as waves crash over my feet.

Suddenly I’m underwater, and come up gasping for air. After four more spills, confidence washes over me as I realise I can get back on my board and that I’m not going to freeze in my sleeveless wetsuit — just as long as I keep paddling. It’s at this point that I begin to feel revitalised by the white-knuckle thrill of it all after miles of sedate paddling. I can’t remember the last time I’ve felt so alive.

After a two-hour battle on Loch Lochy, I’m suddenly embraced by the calm of the canal. The final six miles to Fort William feel like listening to The Lark Ascending after a death metal gig. Autumn sunlight warms my face and scatters in the gentle ripples ahead of me. Soon I’m looking up at the northern slopes of Ben Nevis.

I’m cheered at the finish, with only two people still to come in (seven others have pulled out; Paul Simmons, the fastest paddler, finished a day earlier after one, 11-hour push). Stepping off my board after another seven and a half hours, I will spend the following few days feeling like I’m still afloat, exhausted yet buoyed by the discovery of a new way to immerse myself in the outdoors.

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