Fun Ocean Sports for Your Vacation

Ocean sports are the perfect excuse to enjoy a different type of vacation or to make the most out of visiting the beach.

Whether you’re on vacation or you live near the beach, you can choose from many different types of ocean sports. Most of them require special equipment, but they’re a lot of fun and totally worth trying.

Which ocean sports can you practice?

You can look at them as entertainment during your vacation or as an integral type of workout, even for competitions. The best thing about ocean sports is that they’re fun, and at the same time, they allow you to defy nature. Here are some examples:

1. Surfing: traditional ocean sports

Surfing is ocean sport par excellence. Its main goal is to stand on top of a board and ride the ocean waves. While surfing may seem like a modern discipline, in reality, its history goes back over 500 years. We can trace its origins to the Polynesian islands, Hawaii and the north of Peru.

Nowadays, we have several annual competitions and very different ways of practicing this sport; it all depends on the kind of board: short, long or medium. Another way to classify surf is by the size of the waves, which can be large, medium or small.

2. Rowing: an ocean sport with a lot of history

This is another popular ocean sport. The boat can be an individual or hold several people. Rowing, in particular, is an Olympic discipline and it can either use a fixed or a sliding seat.

This sport also dates far back, since there’s proof there were ancient traditions that used similar boats. The type of organization we know today began in England during the XVII century. It used to be a sport for lords and knights only.

3. Water ski

This sport is also known as waterskiing. As the name entails, it’s a form of skiing but in the water. While it may seem like a ‘kids game’, waterskiing requires good reflex and balance.

It basically consists of skiing on top of the water while holding a rope, which is being pulled by a high-speed motorboat. There are different modalities of this sport: classic, slalom, figures, combined and even barefoot. Another option is wakeboarding -pictured in the cover image- with a single board, just like snowboarding.

4. Windsurf: one of the most exciting ocean sports

Windsurfing is an ocean sport modality that consists of sliding on the water on top of a board that has a sail. Unlike other water vehicles, the sail moves in the direction of the wind.

5. Powerboating: the costly option for ocean sports

It’s perhaps one of the most expensive ocean sports since you need a motorboat to practice it. Powerboating includes different speeds, but the open sea one is known as offshore, which would be the Formula One of these disciplines, with six grand prizes: Malta, Italy, Germany, Mediterranean, Great Britain, and Portugal.

6. Kitesurf

You’ve probably seen this while lying on the sand: a person surfing and holding a gigantic kite at the same time. They were kitesurfing!

This sport consists precisely of sliding on top of the ocean water, using a snowboard as a vehicle and a huge kite as traction.

7. Sailing, the classic ocean sport

Regattas are more than just eye-catching. Watching the majestic sailboats is an impressive spectacle, let alone being on board one of them. Sailing on these types of boats can be both recreational and competitive.

The history of this sport dates back to the XVII century in the Netherlands. However, it turned into a competitive sport in England, more precisely in a regatta at the River Thames. Nowadays, there are three kinds of competitions: light, Olympic and cruise.

Other ocean sports that are worth mentioning are paddle surf (standing on a board and rowing with a large paddle) and bodyboard (similar to surf, but lying on the board instead of standing on top of it). And of course, kayaking or canoeing, which is practiced on a kayak and can be an excellent adventure for your next family vacation.