Imagine being in a lush green valley in the heart of the Italian Alps, paddleboarding through forests, enchanting villages, and crystal-clear waters!

It was a dream come true for Nicola Volani at the end of April 2025, when, with river paddleboarding instructor Marco Prai, they ventured into the Valbrenta. We asked Nicola to share his adventure with us.

Stand-up paddleboarding would be in a very different place if we didn’t have inflatable boards; they’ve made the sport vastly more accessible and affordable. However, they have also brought a variety of interesting new potential problems to the world of boardsports. It’s easy to forget – but we shouldn’t – that an inflatable paddleboard is fundamentally a textile product. It is made of fabric. Unlike a hard board – which may be completely waterlogged and held together by little more than duct tape but it can still be paddled – inflatable boards are rather more binary in function. They’re either a paddleboard, or they’re a pile of wet PVC cloth and polyester thread. If your inflatable board suffers significant damage while you’re out on the water, that change of state from working board to wet cloth can occur very quickly – and your outlook for the immediate future will change equally  dramatically.

So - let’s find out how you can deal with it and self-rescue.