The board class debate. Will it ever end? For now, no… because so many of the top paddlers, top race directors and top board manufacturers disagree about what standards we should have (if any), who should implement them, when they should be implemented and so on.

SUPracer.com played its own small part in the debate, with an opinion piece from the very wise Jim Terrell (the “4 Metre Board Class“) sparking a torrent of debate and being used as a measuring stick for the debate ever since (pun intended). But while there were some very clever suggestions in Jimmy’s piece, the debate has, since then, gone back-and-forth like a driverless, perpetual motion rollercoaster set on loop mode. I.e. we’re no closer to figuring this out and protecting the future of the sport.

Well now there’s another article and it comes from a fairly authoritative source, SUP The Mag, perhaps the leading print publicaiton (and, increasingly, one of the leading websites) in the Stand Up Paddling industry. The mag’s head honcho, Joe Carberry, has just penned an editorial giving his take on the subject, including a shout out to the big guys and a blue sky proposal for restrictions to be aligned with a paddler’s weight.

Check it out:

>>> The Board Size Conundrum – What About The Big Boys

It makes for interesting reading and refreshes the debate at a time when we were just coming back around to the start of the rollercoaster track and risked doing a second lap of the same course. Hopefully we can take a slightly different direction this time round and get some concrete decisions made by the powers that be in 2014, for the good of the sport.