Weather Portland Me

SUP The Coast: Paddle Boarding From Florida To Maine

A little before two o’clock on a sunny June afternoon, on the deck outside a restaurant overlooking a non-descript dock in Portland, Maine, a couple dozen patrons, some of them fortified with beer, await the arrival of Mike Simpson and Will Rich.

For the past four months, Simpson and Rich have been making their way north from Key West, Florida, on two stand-up paddleboards.

As their parents and assorted others peer out into the bay, they see ferry boats, and fishing boats, and the odd sailboat, and then, finally, two guys standing on boards, raising paddles over their heads.

“There they are,” someone shouts, and then somebody pulls out an air horn, and somebody else shouts:

“Where you been?”

Will Rich hits the dock sporting a bushy beard of brown, blond, and red. He tells me he got tired of shaving some time after St. Patrick’s Day. Since he and Mike have been quoted as saying they find paddling a board “energizing,” I ask Will if that’s how he feels now:

“I’m full of all different types of things going on right now,” he says. “I don’t know if words can describe it.

‘Energized’ is pretty good.”

When Mike Simpson bumps up against the dock, he’s already talking. “We’ve been underway now since March 1st, 90 days exactly of paddling days, thirty one days off, and here we are,” he shouts. “We’ve been in pea soup fog since eight o’clock this morning.”

“Just waiting for a crowd to gather?” I ask.

He laughs. “We did stop to pick up some trash,” he says. “Because I called my mother, and she wasn’t anywhere near here, so we had to wait a little bit.”

“She’s up on the dock now?”

He smiles. “She’s right up there,” he says

A few minutes later, mother and son are reunited and hugging.

Mike Simpson’s father, Henry, is on the deck as well. After embracing his son, he tries to talk a little about what Mike and Will have accomplished. He speaks with difficulty, through happy tears.

“Ah, just, today was the culmination of the most awesome adventure that two men could undertake,” he says. “And for a cause much greater than their own. But to see, to be here for the end of it, knowing what they’ve been through, and just undertaking it, and for the reason they undertook it, it’s just something that you don’t think of, that your child’s gonna do that.

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