Providenciales Part 9: Ocean Sports

Even in my old age (jokes, or am I?) I still love trying new things. For the most part, I'm all about traveling to new cities and this year, I drove around France for the first time ever. But for this recent trip to Providenciales, I was hard pressed to find a new thing since I'd been there before and basically did all there was to do.

Luckily for us, our hotel had complimentary rentals on water sports equipment. And since we'd never tried ocean sports before, we decided to give it a go.

On our second or third day, we tried stand up paddle boarding. We watched a couple paddleboarding in the morning and it looked like fun. The woman seemed to be really good at it; the guy fell off several times. We figured that either way, whether we did well or fell off, we wouldn't lose anything. So we signed up with the equipment manager and ran into the water.

We scooched ourselves onto the boards and sat on top as we paddled out into the ocean.

Once we made it sufficiently far out, it was time to try our hand (or feet?) at standing.

And we succeeded! The water was actually pretty rough, to be honest, so I think we were amazing. Had we tried this back during our 2012 trip when the water was crazy calm, we would have been bored. I think the waves made for a challenge and it was a lot of fun.

We managed to paddle back and forth a few times. The only snafu was when my sister fell in after she saw a big fish, got distracted as she tried to point it out to me, and lost her balance.

Other than that, we were total freakin' rockstars.

We probably managed to paddle around and have fun for an hour, which I think is pretty decent. This is a great thigh workout, a great test of balance, and it works your arms too.

As we made our way back to the shore, we sat down to avoid falling over near the crashing surf, and gracefully made our way back onto land.

Towards the end of our trip, we decided that since paddle boarding was such a success, we wanted to try our hand at ocean kayaking. After all, we were amazing when we were standing on the paddle boards and amazing when we were sitting on the paddle boards, we figured we'd be just as amazing sitting in a kayak. And we were. Eventually.

This is how the adventure started. We managed to both climb into the kayak but were immediately flipped over by the violent surf. Then, we managed to both climb into the kayak but somehow lost our balance rather quickly and ended up back in the water. Third time's a charm though,because we finally managed our way back into the kayak and paddled ourselves around happily without any more mishaps.

Ocean kayaking isn't as great a workout as stand up paddle boarding, but it's a lot more fun. It's all about teamwork and coordination.

And of course, it always helps when you're paddling around waters this gorgeous.

I'm still really proud of us! What do you think? I think we were champions, even if we did swallow a little salt water.

Cheers!