Another Surfing Author?

Agatha Christie with her surfing board in Cape Town, South Africa. She was among Britain’s first ‘stand-up’ surfers. Photograph: Museum of British Surfing/SWNS.com


There's no doubt Agatha Christie had a love for telling a gripping murder mystery. But now it appears her talents extended from the typewriter to the surfboard.
Researchers have discovered she was one of Britain's first stand-up surfers, reports the Western Morning News.
Though Christie wrote about her surfing experience in her autobiography, researchers and the surfing community were surprised to learn the mystery writer was a surfing pioneer for Britain.
"In the early 1920s very few British people were surfing and the only one we know about earlier than her, standing up, was Prince Edward," researcher Pete Robinson, founder of the North Devon-based Museum of British Surfing told the South Devon Herald Express.
Christie first took up bodyboarding in the 1920s when she travelled with her husband to Cape Town, South Africa. The trip was part of her husband's task to help organize a world tour to promote the British Empire Exhibition in 1924.
After continuing on to Australia and New Zealand, Christie and her husband then travelled to Hawaii and became surfing experts at Waikiki in Honolulu, reports The Telegraph.
In her autobiography, Christie writes: ''I learned to become expert, or at any rate expert from the European point of view – the moment of complete triumph on the day that I kept my balance and came right into shore standing upright on my board!''
Research is now under way to see if she continued surfing upon her return to the UK. (Tara Kelly from the Huffington Post) 


For more on this, go to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/29/agatha-christie-hercule-poirot-surfing-secret#

Early Stand Up Paddlers

Early stand up paddlers using a couple of Tom Blake hollow paddleboards manufactured by the Mitchell Company, circa 1930s. They were touring the Florida Everglades and apparently weren't taking any chances when it came to being fully prepared, note the pistol on the guy on the right. Photo: Tom Blake archives.