As a nine-time Catalina Classic finisher, director of the Hennessey’s U.S. Paddleboard Festival and promoter of countless other races, Tim Ritter has done much to grow the sport of paddleboarding. As we get  into race season, we caught up with Tim to get his take on the status in paddeboarding.

First off, how long have you been organizing paddleboard events?


I got into paddleboard racing in the early ‘90s and by the mid ‘90s there were only a couple of paddleboard races. There was the Catalina Classic, there was Bay to Bay, and there was a Malibu race. So there was a need for new races, so Paul Hennessey was a good friend and a client of mine, so I went to him and said, “I tell you what. If you sponsor the race I’ll organize a big race.” And we did, and that was the first Hennessey Cup U.S. Championships in 1996 and we got 156 paddlers to show up out of the blue. In other words, every paddleboard in California was being used. We realized that the first race was extremely successful and Paul said, “As long as you want to organize them, I’ll sponsor them.” Since then, it’s grown into a beast. A good beast, but a beast.

As somebody who organizes races, you see a lot of surfers. Is there a difference between the paddlers who race and the paddlers who do it just to get on the ocean.


There absolutely is, especially in these contemporary times that we’re paddling in. Now there’s so many novice boards available. It’s not so underground like it was 15, 20 years ago where it was hard to get a board. Now boards are available and novices are paddling on lakes and surfers are paddling just to stay in shape. The competitive surfers eventually gravitate toward competitive paddling because they like the competitiveness of it, and that’s usually how about 80% of the people go who paddleboard. The beauty of paddleboarding is, you can be a complete novice and still go out and race to participate and you get treated just like the first place guy if you’re the last place guy.

Has the mentality of the people in the races changed?


The equipment has gone leaps and bounds, and training—everyone’s actually training. In the old days, guys would train for Catalina four to six weeks, eight weeks and go for the Catalina. Now, some guys are training year round, some guys train six, eight months out of the year seriously just for paddeboarding racing.

Pretty interesting considering that it’s not like there’s money in paddleboard races.


Overall prize money, between California and Hawaii—I mean, total prize money—is probably like, I don’t know, $40,000. In the scheme of things, that’s not a whole lot of money, but in a way, that’s the beauty of it, too, because we’re able to keep the soul of the sport, we’re not giving away a hundred grand and a Mercedes to every winner.

Paddleboarding has grown so much in the past few years, but the numbers of competitors at races doesn’t seem to have gone up a whole ton on average. Do you think we’ve reached a limit, or is there room for growth?


It’s capable of growing even more. One of the things that you see—like, for instance with our U.S. Championships, which is the most heavily participated-in race on the map. We usually get 900 participants. But the beauty of the sport as it’s grown is there’s so many races now. That’s good and that’s bad because there’s attrition in the races, too. If there were only ten races on the schedule, you’d see 200 or 250 people at a lot of the races, but a lot of people pick and choose races now. There’s a lot more paddlers. The populace of paddlers is huge now compared to even ten years ago. But what happens is a lot of the San Diego guys stay in San Diego to race, a lot of the South Bay guys stay in the South Bay to race, and we’ve kind of become complacent, whereas in the old days, we’d travel everywhere to race. And that segues nicely into a plug for the Paddleboard Series. That’s why we started the Paddleboard Series [or, as we at Paddleboard.com call it, the Paddleboard.com California Grand Prix], so that everybody would participate up and down the coast in all of those races.

Paddleboarding is such a unique sport; what is the benefit that you see in racing?

Half the fun to me of paddleboarding is traveling around. And you meet all these great people that might live in Santa Cruz or Hawaii, and, especially in California, to be able to travel up and down the coast to do a race and see your buddies for a three day weekend— compete, have some beers with them, have dinner, that’s a special thing to go do. It’s like surfing in the fifties. We have unset clubs here. We have the Santa Cruz guys. We have the San Diego guys. We have the North County guys. We have the South Bay guys. We have the Ventura guys. We have the Malibu guys. All of them kind of form their own clubs even though they’re not official.

That’s a good point about surfing in the fifties. With so many new people coming into paddleboarding, do you think paddleboarding’s ties to surfing—our waterman heritage, to use a phrase—is getting diluted?


Everybody uses the term “waterman” so loosely now, but a true waterman, I can count on my ten toes and eight fingers and two thumbs, that’s probably all I know. Just because you go paddleboard and do Catalina doesn’t make you a waterman. There’s a lot of guys that are maybe from a swimming background—which are fantastic athletes and great paddlers–But once again paddleboarding, the good thing about it is that it’s not exclusive, it’s inclusive. You can come from a swimming background, you can come from a surfing background. If you’re just kind of the geek that wanted to go paddle and all of a sudden you can go paddle and you can keep up with half the pack, it’s all good.

Do you think there are people out there who are intimidated by racing?

Yeah, there’s a certain percentage. I’d say to them to come on in, the water’s just fine. All they have to do is do a couple of the smaller races. The bigger races are still intimidating. Catalina’s still intimidating to me and this’ll be my tenth year, but the smaller races, you start off with the three, four mile races at the beginning of the season and work your way up and get your confidence going. Once a novice starts racing a little bit and realizes they can do it, then they have a newfound addiction, but it’s just getting them started.

With the sport growing so much, do you see anything that worries you?

I always looked at growth as good. It’s been great for guys like Joe Bark and Eaton and all the board manufacturers. They’re selling more boards than ever. But growth doesn’t always mean good. Myself and a lot of the other race directors have managed to do a good job in keepin paddleboarding in the right direction. Where sometimes surfing can become crowded and aggravated, paddleboarding is not like that at all, or certainly never has been and hopefully never will be.

Final thoughts?

Once again, it doesn’t matter if you’re the last place guy in, or Kyle Daniels or Jamie Mitchell, everybody has a place and everybody’s approachable and you can all go drink a beer and have a story about your race that day. If it’s a shark, if it’s how you blew up. I wish everybody would come out and race a little bit more and come out and support the races. A lot of work goes into these races and they’re really great for the sport. So, I’d just ask for everybody to come out and support the races a little bit more.