There were a couple of events this week that had me reminiscing about an old post on our blog. Earlier in the week, I was forwarded a Youtube video by a friend. The video shown below features part time Maui resident and Stand Up Paddle/Big Wave charger Laird Hamilton making a cameo appearance on kid’s show Phineas and Ferb. Laird goes zipping by the characters on his stand up paddle board.
The other event is the running of the fifth annual Naish Paddle Championship. In the first couple of years of the championship, Stand Up Paddling was a small, but growing niche of the competition. Prone paddleboarding was the dominant part of the competition. In the fifth year, the vast majority of the participants will have paddles in hand.
The sport of Stand Up Paddling has seen huge growth throughout the last five years. The boards are ubiquitous at surf spots on Maui and locales around the world. As evidenced above, it is even making its way into pop culture references. This is a far cry from just a few years back when The Maui Real Estate Blog was a primary media resource for Stand Up Paddling.
Billy and I were pretty quick to try out the sport of stand up paddle surfing when it came to the shores of Maui. In the 2004 and 2005 time frame, it was a popular cross training tool and alternate surf vehicle for elite water athletes. We were among the first average Joe’s to try the sport. I chronicled some of our initial outings on the water on The Maui Real Estate Blog. As a testament to the limited scope of the sport at the time, it did not take long for one of my stand up paddle blog posts to reach top position in the search engines.
As the sport began to gain in popularity, our ranking for stand up paddle related search terms held, and the post started to draw a lot of traffic and in some cases inquiries. We received e-mails from people as far afield as Brazil, Europe, New Zealand and throughout various parts of the U.S. People wanted to know more about the sport and where they could get the equipment. Our blog post even made it into the Australian Publication Kanu Kulture.
Over the last couple of years, Stand Up Paddling has become the fastest growing segment of the surfing market and our blog post quickly fell in the rankings as sites dedicated to SUP grew in numbers. Billy and I are making it out on our Stand Up Boards a little less than we used to in the past. Creaky joints have not been our friend. That being said, its fun to know our little real estate blog had some relevance in this quickly growing sport.
