SUP Transport and Care: Straps, Heat and Dings

Straps, shade, rinsing and smarter storage.

Your board spends more time strapped, stacked and stored than wet. Do the hours honestly: a couple of paddles a week is a hundred-odd hours a year on the water and thousands of hours on a roof, in a garage or in a bag. Nearly every board that fails, fails during those other hours. Care is not something you do to a board between sessions. It is where most of the board's life actually happens, and it is the difference between a board you sell and a board you replace.

On the roof

Deck down, fins up and forward. Lay the board upside down on the bars so the hull faces the sky and the fin points up and towards the windscreen. Fin forward stops it catching the airflow at 100 km/h, and deck down keeps the fin box off the bar. That box is a hole in your board carrying the most concentrated load of any part of it. Carrying two, go deck to deck with a towel between them.

Cam straps, not ratchets. A ratchet gives you far more mechanical advantage than a board can survive, and people use all of it. Cam straps let you pull hand-tight and stop. Pad the bars, run the straps over the board and under the bar, and put one strap roughly a third of the way in from each end, never both in the middle.

Tight enough is looser than you think. The test is that the board will not slide when you shove it hard fore and aft. That is it. Crank past that and you are pressing a rail into a metal bar for two hours at highway speed, which puts a permanent dent in an EPS board or delaminates the skin around the pressure point. If your strap has creased the rail, you were two turns too enthusiastic last time you drove. Check them again ten minutes into any long drive, because everything settles. And put a single twist in each strap along its run, which kills the hum that otherwise drives everyone in the car mad.

Heat is the enemy

An inflatable is a pressure vessel, and heat is pressure. The air inside is sealed, so when the sun heats it the pressure climbs with nowhere to go. Pump to 15 psi in cool morning air, leave the board on the grass through the middle of the day, and the internal pressure keeps rising past what you set, in a direction you cannot see. Seams and glued rails are what give up. So an inflated board in the sun gets shade, water over it, or a few psi let out. Never leave one inflated in a locked car.

A hard board cooks differently, and worse. An EPS core is mostly air in millions of small cells, skinned with a thin stiff shell. Heat it and the air in the core expands against a shell that will not move, and eventually the skin lifts away from the foam. That is delamination, and once it starts it does not stop. The classic way to do it is a dark board bag on a roof rack in a February car park, or a board left deck up on hot sand while you have lunch.

"Heat is the only thing that damages a board while you are asleep."

One rule covers both. Out of the sun whenever it is not being ridden. In the shade, on its rail rather than flat on hot sand, or simply under a tree. A bag is sun protection and dent protection at once, but a black one on a roof in an Australian summer is an oven with a handle, so choose the pale one.

Rinse it, dry it, then bag it

Salt is the slow one. Dried salt holds moisture against everything it sits on, so it keeps working on fin screws, leash plugs, handle inserts and valve threads long after you have gone home. Fresh water over the whole board after every salt session, including the deck pad, which holds salt like a sponge, and especially the fin box and the leash plug.

Sand is the fast one. Sand in a fin box grinds the thread. Sand in an inflatable's valve stops it sealing, and that is how a board mysteriously loses 3 psi overnight and gets blamed for a puncture it does not have. Rinse the valve area properly and keep the cap on whenever you are not pumping.

Dry before it goes away. A rolled inflatable that went into its bag damp comes out smelling like a swamp and grows mildew on the fabric, which does not come out of a deck pad easily. Stand the board up, let it drip, wipe the deck, and leave it in the shade until it is genuinely dry rather than nearly dry.

Dings on a hard board

Every ding is a water intake. The problem is not the cosmetic damage, it is that an EPS core wicks water like a sponge and does not give it back. A board that has taken on water gets heavy, goes soft underfoot and delaminates around the wet area. The clock starts the moment the shell is broken.

Get it out of the water, then tape it. Any crack you can catch a fingernail in, any soft spot, any place that fizzes bubbles when you press it, is open. Dry the area as best you can and cover it with waterproof repair tape to get home. Tape is a lift home, not a repair, and a taped ding left for a month is a wet core.

Dry it before you fix it. Resin will not stick to a wet core, it will simply seal the water in, so a board that has taken water wants days somewhere warm and shaded, ding facing down, before anyone repairs it. Do not speed that up with sun, because heat plus a wet core is the fastest delamination there is. If the ding is on a rail, near the fin box, or anywhere that flexes, get it done properly rather than with a hardware-store kit, because those are the areas that fail twice.

Storing it for the winter

Store an inflatable soft, not hard and not flat. Leaving it at full riding pressure for months keeps the seams loaded with nothing to gain. Rolling it tight and forgetting it puts a permanent crease in the drop-stitch. The middle option is the right one: either leave it inflated at around 3 to 5 psi, enough to hold its shape with the seams relaxed, or roll it loosely with the valve open and no sharp folds. Either way, indoors, out of direct sun, away from anything that gets hot.

A hard board wants support and darkness. Flat on padded racks, on its rail in a vertical rack, or on its tail in a corner with something soft underneath. What kills them is months propped on two hard points, which puts a slow bend in the rocker, and storage in a hot roof space or against the western wall of a shed. Cool, dark, evenly supported.

Small things that decide your spring. Take the fins out, because a screw left in a salty box for six months seizes. Wash and dry the leash. Loosen the paddle's adjustment collar. Then look at the board once, mid-winter; ten seconds tells you whether a bad prop or a leaking roof is quietly ruining your season.

Where it goes wrong

There is a dent along the rail exactly where the strap sat. Over-tightened straps, probably ratchets. Fix: cam straps, hand-tight, and use the shove test instead of your arms.

The inflatable went soft in the sun and then blew a seam. Backwards logic bites here. It did not go soft, it went hard, and if you topped it up at the beach you added to an already rising pressure. Fix: never pump a hot board, shade or wet it instead.

The deck feels crunchy or slightly soft underfoot. Delamination starting, from heat or from an old ding letting water in. Fix: stop paddling it in the sun, get it dry, get it looked at. It does not repair itself and it spreads.

Your board has quietly gained a few kilos. Water in the core through a ding you did not take seriously. Fix: find it, dry it for as long as it takes, repair it properly. This is the failure that ends boards.

Next session, one job. When you come off the water, run the whole routine once, deliberately, in order: rinse, dry, shade, strap hand-tight. Time it. It is about four minutes, and four minutes a session is the entire difference between a board that holds its value and one that quietly rots. The classifieds will show you what that difference is worth.

Do I need to deflate my inflatable between sessions?

If you paddle weekly and can store it inflated indoors out of the sun, leave it up. It saves you pumping and costs the board nothing. What you cannot do is leave it inflated in a car, on a trailer, or anywhere it will bake.

How tight is hand-tight, really?

Pull until the board will not shift when you shove it hard fore and aft, then stop. Not one more pull. If you are bracing a foot against the car to tension a strap, you are compressing a foam board with your bodyweight.

Can I leave the board on the roof overnight?

Mechanically the board does not mind, if the straps are sound. Practically it is the most common way to lose one, and dew plus salt on the rack is doing your hardware no favours. Take it off.

Is a board bag worth it if I only drive ten minutes?

Yes, mostly for sun and for the dings that happen in garages and car parks rather than on the water. Choose a light colour. A black bag on a roof in an Australian summer collects heat rather than blocking it, which is the opposite of what you bought it for.