In this engaging interview, Ana, the founder of Standup Paddleboarding with Ana, shares her journey into the world of Stand Up Paddle boarding and her passion for promoting a life on the water. Beginning her adventure eight years ago in Cornwall, Ana’s love for paddling has blossomed into a thriving business that offers a diverse range of experiences, from group paddles to unique events like SUP yoga and river cleanups. She discusses her commitment to safety, her personalized teaching approach for all skill levels, and her aspirations for fostering a supportive community. Ana’s deep connection to nature and her dedication to mental wellbeing shine through, making her words enticing to visit the UK and sign up for Standup Paddleboarding with Ana.
I’ve always been an outdoorsy person and I started paddling myself about eight years ago taking a lesson in Cornwall in the UK and then I bought my first board down at the beach at Beckhill, where I still have a flat and I’ve had it for 17 years. Then in Covid I moved the board to Tunbridge Wells in Kent where I am based and my home is to use it on River Medway. I started there with my first instructor course in 2021, followed by the coach course in 2022, and my leader in 2023 and it’s been building up ever since. This is my fifth year and it’s all around my passion for the sport and the water.
So currently I am based in Kent, in the UK, which is southeast of Kent of UK. It’s called The Garden of England, and rightly so is the most beautiful part of UK. Maddi I hope you can come one day so I can show you around. I do my lessons on the River Medway. Which is a very calm river with flat water and a section of 30 kilometers of just pure, flat joy to paddle. We have five medieval castles on the river which we paddle past.
I also use a couple of local reservoirs and lakes. When the river is in a flood in the UK it works like a traffic light system. So it’s red, yellow, and green. In the winter we have got a lot of Red, so the river is flooding and coming in very fast and very high. In that situation I do the meetups at the local Bewl Water, which is a beautiful, huge reservoir in the Southeast, it’s about 13 miles around. I also use a little lake, which is a private lake, one of my friend’s lakes, where I can do lessons as well as mini retreats. So I invite women locally to meet up for SUP yoga, sound bath for paddleboards, nordic walking and paddleboarding. So again, working with local businesses, small local businesses, we create a safe environment where women can just relax for half a day. Taking the time from the usual to ground and take part to different activities as well as wild swimming.
Once a week I invite people to join me on Rivers, they are a bit further away from the River Medway, an hour and a half, we go and travel to places such as Cambridge, Oxford, Canterbury, Basingstoke Canal, Hythe Canal. All bodies of water that are local, but beautiful, and it feels like you’re going away, but it’s only one day. One day where you can just have a mini holiday.
It’s the variety. So Standup paddleboarding with Ana has got a variety of experiences starting with a lesson. Then I do half day paddles group paddles and a very popular one is the Friday one that I call “Ladies Who Launch” and it’s over four hours where we meet, we launch, and then we paddle again back. That is very popular for mothers who drop their kids to school and then they come and relax till about two o’clock when they go back to pick up their children and then they’re ready for the weekend.
We have SUP yoga, so paddle boarding on yoga on paddle boards. We have sound bath on paddleboards. We have SUP with your pup, so that’s taking your dog on paddle boards, we have children camps, we have river cleanups in collaboration with planet patrol, a worldwide organization that has kindly given us the buckets and the grabbers and all other equipment to do river cleanups. So very environmentally friendly, and that leads me into corporate events.
I work with all sorts of local businesses to provide team building events, river cleanups, or just a simple tour of the River Medway where I operate. Then I also run two day retreats which are local, approximately an hour and a half to two hours away from the River Medway. We visit Chichester in the West Sussex, we visit Cambridge, we visit Canterbury, North Kent and then we move on to trips are bit further away in the Field Lake District, which is a very popular one, Wales and Scotland, right in the wild. After that I’m moving on to trips abroad, which are normally anywhere from five days to seven days retreats that covers all sorts of abilities and needs.
That’s a very good question. I tend to have loads of beginner lessons come through my door and from the lesson one, I always tell people to actually come and join the longer trips ’cause I truly believe that if they come on a longer trip, they pick up a bit more information than actually attending say five lessons and never come to the group paddles. If anyone finds after one or two paddles that they’re too slow or they struggle with certain things such as keeping the board straight or standing up for too long or something, then I invite them to an intermediate lesson to which I explain more in depth the mechanics of how the board works, what they should do, and maybe they’re on the wrong board if they’ve come to a lesson with their own board. So then I can just direct them to, maybe try this or that, or even the wrong paddle which is often, I believe more important than the actual board.
With the experience paddlers in fairness, I have not dealt with a lot of the experience paddlers, although I have been just trained into my race coach award so I could actually deal with anything more advanced. I have myself been on multiple courses on advanced kind of paddling including my collaboration with Seychelle in Florida over the last two years.
I say Seychelle being a four time world champion, that obviously gave me a lot more experience of how to coach. Although she has got a different coaching style and we all teach differently. So I tend to work with British canoeing coaches and also assessors of British canoeing where I pick up different ways and so then I can actually put that in practice in teaching my more experienced paddlers.
So firstly, being qualified and overqualified, I think that’s my most proud moment. I have invested many hours in my qualifications, so I did a three day instructor course, a two day coach course, a four day leadership course and another two days race coach course. With all with British Canoeing which is our UK compliant body for paddleboarding is they’re now called “Paddle UK”. They just changed their name. So I am very proud of those qualifications and what I’ve learned through them.
So for safety, I have got for my bag I have got all the necessary equipment I take onboard with me, such as the first aid, the shelter emergency kit, obviously all the change clothes always the phone or even two phones charged up, and for the sea paddles I also have a GPS tracker if we don’t have signal. Secondly, all my instructors and leaders that I use on my paddles are trained with ‘SUP with Ana’. So they have started with the lesson with me and they have moved on over the last, five years into becoming instructors and leaders. So I also offer courses to people to become instructors or leaders and they can then start working for me. I have got a very close touch with my British canoeing assessor, Chris Conley who comes and oversees these courses and the people get their qualification awards certificates via British or paddle UK as they call now. So it’s all very related and very up to date.
I think it’s got to be probably, one lady who is disabled and she has had a stroke a few years ago and she was in coma for six months. She came to me about three years ago and said “I can’t stand up” because she has got a weakness on her right hand side of her body. We walked through it and I said “yes, of course you can stand up” but the way I made her stand up is by coming up from a downward dog yoga position just because of her flexibility and putting down her foot heel was quite difficult for her to do. So it was a different way of getting her to stand and then she did it a few more times, and she got more confident. When she came out with us for regular meetings it was quite useful because then she could practice. So that’s one good thing that I was quite proud of.
The other thing I would say is the wildlife and nature. I’ve had, gosh, seals unusual to have a seal on the river as well, which is quite unusual in this part of the country. I’ve had the little water mice. There’s a name for them. I can’t remember now. But basically the wildlife always surprises me and the clients. And then visiting other countries, all the experience I have had in Florida, for instance, with all the manatees and the dolphins there. Wildlife always. Absolutely. I just love the wildlife.
Essentially my first interaction with the client would be – they’ll come for a first lesson, then they’ll be invited to a two hour meet up tour. Then they could do a half a day tour, then they could do a full day tour, and then they can move on to a two day full tour.
So two days trips will usually be something in the UK within an hour or two hours driving in locations such as Wales or Scotland. We have trips there that are a bit more challenging and the duration is longer, two to four days sometimes. Afterwards we have got moving on to trips abroad which are normally around five days to seven days. Now the trips are selected by what the clients want. So I get a lot of information from my clients when they come and where they would like to visit and places to paddle.
So I started my first trip was in 2021 in Sardinia. I had a smaller client base then and 12 beautiful ladies have decided to come and join me on a Sardinian trip. From Sardinia, everything else was built around what the clients wanted and also what my current partners have introduced me to. The Sardinia guy introduced me to the Slovenian guy, the Slovenian guy told me about the Croatian guy, and then I think Florida, it was via social networking. Seychelle speaks for herself, obviously on the socials and with her background in racing. And then from there, Portugal is on the books, Switzerland, and Spain is coming up as well. As for next year, probably some surfing in Puerto Ventura, also planning to go to Romania still, which is my home country. I had a chat about Canada, Costa Rica, even Australia with Michael Booth. The paddleboarding community is rather small if you think… the whole world is small, really.
So my plan is to do most of the countries in Europe to start with and then try to expand, but I find that people are not that keen on traveling for too far. Obviously the costs involved are higher and also the time away because most of my clients are women mothers. They have got children on tow. They can’t obviously leave the children for too long. So I find the local traveling times a two hours plus is just enough.
The first international trip was in 2021, 4 years ago, and it was Sardinia. It was a beautiful October, end of October and the weather was turning here in UK. But we flew over to Sardinia and it was 30 degrees at the end of October, and I remember the beautiful blue, clear waters where we snorkeled and we paddled the sea and we paddled the river in a place called Bosa. I worked there with Fabrizio, again, a small family who runs their own business in Sardinia. It was just beautiful. The Italians know how to lead, their food is insane. We had different restaurants booked every night. We different paddles every day. It was a seven day absolutely bliss that everyone came out buzzing from, and then they requested more. And so this started my journey in finding more locations in Europe to start with and then having my first trip in outside Europe, in Florida with Seychelle and that was in 2024, so my first US trip. I must touch on the fact that I now am joined in my trips abroad by international people. So I had clients from Germany, from America coming to UK and America coming to places like Slovenia and Croatia, and I am very proud to develop an international client.
So everyone is welcome to join from anywhere in the world. We all meet at the airport in the country where the trip is hosted. So there is no fear for anyone being lost or can’t get in touch. The way I operate is as soon as people join a trip abroad, I create a WhatsApp group where everyone gets together, I tend to put a one day paddle a month before the trip so people can already meet and get to know each other, and then we go on holiday as we are already knowing each other. So yeah it’s beautiful.
In my opinion and my favorite way of using paddle boarding, if I may say so, is actually for the mental wellbeing. You can make it work for you physically. Obviously it’s not as intense if you are just a recreational paddle boarder, but you can race, which will make you work on your body to have the resistance and the the intensity you need to compete. But I personally use it more self for mental wellbeing because being grounded on a busy life that we all have and not having access to the phone because obviously you have to have a paddle in your hand.
We are all guilty these day and age of looking at our phones far too much and if you take an hour, two hours, four hours on the water without actually checking onto your phone every five minutes, that is a big thing. That is just taking us back to our roots. So that is huge. And then obviously you just notice more. I see changes in the seasons, I never stop paddleboarding the whole year round. Loads of people have got seasons, but no, there’s no season at SUP with Anna. We paddle all year round, so I notice, when there’s the bare trees in the winter. My favorite time is paddling the winter. There’s no one else out there apart from one or two or three of us paddling. So noticing, noticing like the fields are away because everything is dead. The nature is sleeping.
Then to wake up to spring with the flowers around, the trees blossom the daffodils coming up. Then moving on to the summer where everything is just green, it’s like a jungle. Sometimes we have to just cut out the trees as we go through our “Amazon”, the river midway sometimes becomes an “Amazon” in the summer it’s just so overgrown. So it’s just mind blowing. I absolutely love paddling just for the mindfulness.
I hope this carries on. I don’t know what I would do without paddle boarding because I am addicted to paddle boarding. So I just hope that people are still going to come out. It’s definitely a shift in the market with people tending not to do so much recreational paddle boarding, it’s not a bad thing, but then, I don’t know… I think people lose the love because, to be an athlete and to move on to more intense kind of schedules of racing and it’s a bit lonely I find having to come out and to train to to be a racer is hard work.
Loads of my clients are generally women, 40 plus. But I just hope that, we are going to stay grounded and remember why we fell in love with paddle boarding, which most of my clients say, it’s the mindfulness, it’s the grounding, it’s the nature. That’s how it all starts and then just carry on and showing people different beautiful places to paddle different pieces of water and create accessible trips. I tried to give reasonable pricing by working with local, small businesses like myself.
So I have a big pride on researching my clients that are actually a family running a small business, just like I do. I just love working with and supporting small businesses. So that’s my plan. Just continue to support a small, local businesses and just get more people to fall in love with a sport for the reason I am in love with, which is the mindfulness.
I hope that they come away with a huge smile. But I hope they take away the love for the water. Most of them will come because they love the water, but they come away with a new hobby. They come away with new friends. They come away feeling part of a community. That’s what I am trying to create, a huge community of lovers for water, not only water. I create a safe environment where I invite people to different activities, especially throughout the winter when some people prefer not to paddle.
I create an adventure book club we meet once a month. I create different activities that people can just join, such as we have a once a month meetup where there’s an offer either like a sauna and cold plunge or we had an aerial class hoop aerial, which is quite popular. We are going try a painting class. So different activities to suit different taste, but to keep the community engaged and together throughout the winter and then into the new spring and summer.
Thank you so much for joining us today Ana! That was so much fun to chat with you and learn more about Standup Paddleboarding with Ana!
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