This weekend was the last before the beginning of the summer holidays and the summer rush. It was great to decompress around the normal running lessons and have the opportunity to run our first SUP Yoga class bright and early on Saturday morning with Kimberley Yoga, as well as two days filled with surfing and yoga at our Stretch & Surf Yoga Day Retreats. Feeling good going into the first summer at Blue Coast!
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SUP Yoga
I'm really grateful to Kimberley for partnering with Blue Coast for Paddleboard Yoga. I'd been to one of Kimberley's classes before and really enjoyed it and after Kimberley came along to paddleboard with Blue Coast we were excited to partner up and bring a new offering to the local area and to Moray in general.
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The first class was a learning experience! A few teething issues with the paddleboard anchors I'd made up as well as just a new experience for both me and Kimberley in delivering this type of class. The wind was a gusting offshore and even in the shelter of Portknockie Harbour it tested the hold of the little anchors on the soft sand - a couple lessons learned! Kimberley did a fantastic job though and we received some great positive feedback from the participants - big thank you for coming along.
We plan to announce further dates in the coming week and are looking at offering morning and evening sessions once a month, with the possibility of combining a SUP Yoga Class with a condensed Introduction to Paddleboarding in one of the sessions.
Big thanks to Shelley Mackie for taking some brilliant photos of the class.
Stretch & Surf Yoga Day Retreats
Over the next days we ran two day retreats at Blue Coast, combining yoga and surfing with some nice food at the end of the day in good company.
The first day we experienced some strong gusting wind which added another element to the warming pre-surf flow on the beach!
It made the surf challenging also but the students all did great - plenty of waves caught and I even spotted a couple shakas thrown.
We were able to find some shelter from the wind at the beach in front of Seatown for the restorative class at the end of the day, relaxing on a calm empty beach with the waves providing a natural soundtrack.
On the second day the wind had eased and the students pre-surf yoga on the beach left them slightly less windswept!
Into the sea for the surf which was accompanied by a torrential downpour to begin with before the still. We were wet anyway and the texture of rain on the water never gets old! Everyone put in a great effort and there were many more smiles and waves caught. A couple rumbles of thunder and a flash of lightning in the distance brought the lesson to an end right at the 2 hour mark, but that didn't stop one of the students running out to get one more wave!
Sunday's post-surf yoga was held at the Cullen Bowling Club for an indoor venue, and the students came back very zenned out and ready to eat. After both days we enjoyed some feel-good pub grub at The Royal Oak Hotel, and it was great getting to know everyone better while refuelling after two active days.
Big thanks to Meghan for teaching yoga on these retreats, and for snapping away some great photos while getting rained on under my Dryrobe! Thank you to everyone that came along to these days and made them a success. We hope everyone enjoyed their experience and left feeling good, we certainly did!
