Three Cool Water Sports: Wakeboarding, Jet Skiing and Paddleboarding
As soon as people were able to, they took sports into the water; swimming, surfing, water polo and numerous other aquatic activities all sprung up over the years. However, there are three very interesting water sports that demand some attention. Wakeboarding, jet skiing and paddleboarding are three very interesting and unique water sports that have gotten people very excited over the years. Paddleboarding is a pretty old sport, while riding jet skis is fairly recent, but wakeboarding is the newest water sport of the three. With people always experimenting and coming up with new sports all the time, it is no wonder that there are so many new sports that take place in the water now and there will be more new ones in the future. In the meantime, let’s examine what makes these three great sports so ‘cool’.
Out of the three sports, the oldest seems to be paddleboarding. The sport consists of people standing upright on a large surfboard and using a paddle to steer the board to whichever direction they want. It is used as a recreational device, a sport, people race them and it is a great workout method as well. Water sport enthusiasts enjoy paddleboarding because it requires less strain and effort to control than a windsurfing board, is easier to do than surfing and is a lot of fun as well. At the end of the day, paddleboarders get a lot of exercise while having a great time. The practice seems to have been developed in the 1920s and 30s when surfers would use their boards to ferry tourists around the numerous islands in Hawaii. Tourists would get on and like a gondola driver, a surfer would use an oar to paddle them to their destination. From these interesting beginnings, the activity grew into a proper sport with enthusiasts thinking up ways to race each other on the boards. This sport is seeing a massive resurgence in the state of Florida in America at the moment.
Jet Ski riding is actually not the correct name for the sport. Even though the name Jet Ski has become the generic name for any motorized one-person water craft, it is actually the brand name for a specific type of water craft made by Kawasaki. The proper name for the sport should be Personal Water Craft riding or PWC riding. Kawasaki started a huge worldwide trend when they brought the first personal water craft to the market which was invented by Clayton Jacobson II. It started a revolution in water sports; until then, the only way for people to race across the water using a motorised vehicle was to race boats. Jet Skis brought about individual riding in the water and people started to race these as well as boats. They were invented in 1976, and since then, companies such as Yamaha, Bombardier and others entered the market with their own versions of PWCs. Jet Ski competitions take place ever year all around the world and they are called Professional Freestyle Competitions. Freestyle competitions are where riders on PWCs do tricks and score points. It looks like riding PWCs will continue to become more and more popular as time goes by.
The final interesting water sport to be explored is wakeboarding. Wakeboarding is a cross between surfing and water skiing. Boarders ride short surfboard type boards and they are pulled by a motorboat. Wakeboarding began in the 1980s after pioneers of the sport got together and devised a way to combine surfing and water skiing. The result was a cool new sport with a board that had straps on it and a fin for speed and manoeuvrability and gave the boarders the ability to do tricks. Recently, the sport has become very popular and a teenager from the UK has successfully wakeboarded across the English Channel. British schoolboy, 17-year old Edward Bosson, completed the 21-mile journey in about two hours. Despite falling off the board numerous times, he accomplished what no one else had done before. Now it is up to the World Record Committee to decide if he has achieved a world record or not.
Even though new water sports keep emerging all the time, these three are definite mainstays in the world of aquatic sports. In time, new sports will emerge but people will continue to find joy and competitiveness in wakeboarding, paddleboarding and PWC riding for many years to come.
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