The Boards of Summer

Built for speed and distance, paddleboards range in size from the international lifeguarding standard "10-6" (10 feet, six inches) to 12, 14, 18 feet and even longer. Dalkiewicz's own 14-footer is slung from the ceiling of his shop. If you're over Ocean City way, he'll give you a lesson on it.

But why, you might ask, would you want that lesson? What's the appeal?

"It's nice because it's simple." That's the verdict of Ed Wigglesworth, 35, a surfer, paddleboarder and general manager of Chesapeake Light Craft in Annapolis, which offers 30 different boat-building kits for the home consumer, including the 16-foot-long San O' (after San Onofre Beach, Calif.) paddleboard co-designed and race-tested by Californian and competitive paddleboarder Larry Froley. "You don't have a paddle," Wigglesworth says. "You don't have a life jacket. You don't have anything. It's just you and the board and nature. And it's really fast."

And a workout, too. Don't think that simple is the same thing as easy, Wigglesworth says. "A first-timer, you are probably not going to be able to do it more than 10 minutes."

Michael O'Shaughnessy, a Florida paddleboarder, agrees. "You can watch a paddler and go, 'Wow, that looks really easy,' but when you get on the board, it's not that easy. First you have to balance on these slivers of fiberglass, and then you have to move. When you first start this sport, the burning sensation in your shoulders is almost unbearable. You could swim a half-mile, but when you first start paddleboarding you can't do that; your shoulders will hurt too much."

Sound like fun yet? Well how about this: To a serious paddleboarder, a half-mile isn't even worth getting wet for. If you're not far from sight of shore with deep-sea creatures sniffing at your toes, you're just warming up. O'Shaughnessy, 48, has organized several (and paddled in three) Cuba-to-United States team paddles (accompanied by support boats) and is hoping to pull off a solo (though still with support boats) Bimini-to-Florida transit later this month, in tribute to paddleboarding great Gene "Tarzan" Smith, who in October 1940 paddled 100 miles in 30 hours, from Oahu to Kauai, on a 14-foot-long wooden board, through darkness, sharks, Portuguese man-of-wars and hallucinations that he was paddling down Hollywood Boulevard. Paddleboarder Larry Capune traveled 4,255 miles in 319 days, from Portland, Maine, to Corpus Christi, Tex., in 1975. Two of the best-known paddleboarding races, the venerable Catalina Classic and the Molokai-to-Oahu, are 32 miles each. Last year's Catalina winner nipped that off in a neat 5 hours 9 minutes and 40 seconds. At 65, Mike Eaton, who built his first paddleboard in 1968 (that's an Eaton in Dalkiewicz's shop), did the Catalina in 10 hours; this year, at 70, he's hoping to do it again.

Clearly, minimalism plus distance is what thrills the heart of the dedicated paddleboarder.

For his Bimini bid, O'Shaughnessy cheerfully predicts "a 98 percent chance of failure" what with the threat of hurricanes, wind, waves, fierce currents, jellyfish by the acre, carnivorous fish, the dark hours before dawn and more. "I'd like to at least get to the 10-hour mark," he says. "If I've got flat water and I'm feeling good, I'd like to get to 20 hours on the board. I feel like I'm living when I'm doing these paddles. It's beautiful when you are riding an open ocean swell. You'll see stingrays, turtles, dolphins, sharks trailing you like packs of coyotes. I'm in the water, but I'm not a swimmer in the water -- I'm on top of it. There's a real beauty to it."

"The ocean is a wilderness. It's like a foreign land," Dalkiewicz says.

Though a first-timer wouldn't be advised to venture any transnational expeditions (not that you could get that far, what with your shoulders likely to start begging for mercy before you'd cleared the harbor breakwater), there's something else to be said for giving this sport a try. "You're really in an intense workout," O'Shaughnessy says. "All you have to do is paddle a few miles every day, and your body starts to look like you did in your teen years."

OCEAN ATLANTIC SURFING -- 3404 Coastal Hwy., Ocean City, Md.; 410-289-3830.

PADDLEBOARDS.COM -- Links, photos, "hall of fame," paddleboarding stories and more (check out the Cuba Paddle section's QuickTime movie to get a feel for paddleboarding in motion) at Michael O'Shaughnessy's Web sitehttp://www.paddleboards.com.

EATON PADDLEBOARDS -- For stories, information, legendary paddlers and, of course, gear from Eaton Paddleboards, visithttp://www.eatonsurf.com.

CHESAPEAKE LIGHT CRAFT -- 1805 George Ave., Annapolis. 410-267-0137.http://www.clcboats.com. Build your own 16-foot-long paddleboard with Chesapeake Light Craft's race-tested kit.

Caroline Kettlewell is the author, most recently, of the high-voltage true story "Electric Dreams" and can be found in cyberspace at http://www.carolinekettlewell.com .