Day Drunk SUP
I’d gone to Barbados, traveling with someone for once (Alice), to visit someone else (Dr. Banks) and get away from my cubicle. I woke up fuzzy and slightly sunburnt, just the way you want to when you’re on vacation somewhere sunny – not hungover enough to ruin the day, but groggy enough to look forward to feeling better. The not-quite-hangover had been earned the night before at an amazing little seafood restaurant where Alice and the doc drank a lot of champagne, and I drank a lot of rum punch with the doc’s date, Bullseye. Alice and the doc are both hyper intelligent creatures and, even before we’d arrived, they had somehow connected with each other and discovered a mutual love for champagne and all things wine-finery. Bullseye is a bright spark as well but she thankfully isn’t a champagne person, so we just laughed while the other two put away a small nation’s GDP worth of bubbly and Alice stole the wine chiller.
It was my birthday, or the day after. We’d managed to crawl out of the room in time for the doc to return from work around noon. He’d arranged lunch at some joint that, before we even headed out, he had to apologize to me for. “It’s a bit fancy. You’ll be fine.” I’m not a big fan of fancy, but it’s a small island and the doc was hosting and treating me/us like royalty, so I sure as hell wasn’t about to start complaining.
Barbados has two faces (other than the east and the west), and this place was definitely at the far end of one of them. Mostly white people, finely dressed in yachting clothes, making polite murmuring sounds as they tinkled plates with actual silverware. Alice and the doc laughed and conspired over the wine list while our fourth, M, another good friend and coworker of the doc’s, ordered me and himself rum sours, then immediately ordered two more. This wasn’t the kind of place that made a good rum punch – sours would have to suffice.
Lunch was amazing (I totally forget what I had, but it came from the sea, and was cold and tart and refreshing), and while the other two finished two bottles of something with bubbles, M and I finished six rum sours each and thought about shots of tequila in a place that almost certainly didn’t have shot glasses. Someone paid for my lunch (no one would take a penny from me) and we wandered back to the parking lot to unload the doc’s SUP equipment. M returned from the fancy place with four plastic cups of rum sour (weren’t expecting plastic cups? me neither) and we chugged them back while the doc gave me and Alice rudimentary lessons on how not to die on a paddle board. Neither of us had ever done it before. Before pushing us out to sea, his parting words were “don’t get caught in the current, or we’ll have to catch up with you in Grenada.”
Alice and I bobbed around, buzzed and happy, getting a feel for the ocean under the board under our feet, and learning the hard way how not to lean when paddling. She picked it up a lot faster than I, and I spent a lot of time drinking salt water. We pushed the common sense limit on getting too far out to sea, before lying on our bellies to paddle back in, maybe 30 minutes later.
Before handing the boards over to the guys, Alice proposed a SUP-yoga session, to a general round of mirth at the thought of my uncoordinated self managing yoga on dry land, let alone floating drunk on a paddleboard with a gentle Caribbean current pushing us around. M handed me another sour while the three of us watched Alice attempt a forearm stand on her board – she pulled her legs in, held her core and caught her balance, and then promptly fell over while trying to extend upwards. We all clapped and cheered, because it was more than I think any of us were expecting, even with the tumble.
She laughed, took a swig from a sour, got back on the board, and did it. One forearm stand, second attempt, first time SUP, two bottles of champagne and two (three?) rum sours in, on a hungover Sunday in Barbados. Held it for five seconds, then dropped into the ocean with a happy yelp.
