Is It Possible to Circumnavigate Lake Tahoe on a Paddleboard With Little Experience
Neither my best friend Michael Whalen nor I had paddled all that much before we set out to circumnavigate Lake Tahoe on stand-up paddleboards. Five days, seventy-two miles, both of us relatively new to the sport. We finished it, and I still think about how much of the trip's difficulty came from things other than raw paddling skill. If you're wondering whether you need years of SUP experience before attempting something like this, here's the honest answer, built from actually doing it without much experience ourselves.
What We Actually Knew Going In
Between us, we had some recreational paddling experience, mostly short outings on calm water, nothing close to the multi-day, open-water conditions we ended up facing. We hadn't trained specifically for this trip in any structured way. What we had instead was general physical fitness, a decade of my own experience in demanding outdoor environments through other kinds of expeditions, and a willingness to figure things out as they came up rather than needing every skill mastered before we launched.
What Turned Out to Matter More Than Paddling Skill
Physical endurance mattered more than technical paddling ability. Being able to stay upright and keep moving for six or seven hours a day, across five consecutive days, drew more on general fitness and mental persistence than on any refined paddling technique. Decision-making under changing conditions mattered enormously, arguably more than raw skill. Knowing when to wait out a headwind, when to push through building swell, and when to call it for the day required judgment that came from paying close attention in the moment, not from years of prior SUP-specific training.
Where Our Inexperience Actually Showed
The moments that tested us most were the ones involving real chop, particularly the crossing near Sand Harbor where a tailwind built swell strong enough to nearly knock us off our boards multiple times. An experienced paddler likely reads and reacts to that kind of building swell earlier and more instinctively than we did. We were reactive rather than anticipatory in that moment, which made an already difficult crossing harder than it needed to be. If you're attempting a similar trip with limited experience, understand that rough water is where your inexperience will be most exposed, and plan conservative routing decisions around that reality.
How to Build Baseline Competence Before You Go
You don't need years of paddling behind you, but a few sessions in genuinely choppy conditions before your trip will teach you more than a dozen calm-water outings. Practice falling and recovering. Practice paddling seated in rough water, since that's a real technique you may need mid-trip, not just a fallback. And practice loading your board with real weight beforehand, since a loaded board handles differently than an empty one in ways that are worth learning about before you're a mile offshore.
What I'd Tell Someone With Similar Experience to What We Had
If you're reasonably fit, comfortable with physical discomfort, and willing to make conservative decisions rather than pushing through conditions you're unsure about, a trip like this is achievable without years of dedicated SUP experience. What you're trading for that lack of technical skill is a slower, more cautious pace and a wider safety margin. Build extra days into your timeline specifically to account for your own inexperience, and treat every wind or swell decision as an opportunity to be more conservative than an expert paddler might need to be.
Why the Trip Was Still Worth It Despite the Learning Curve
Some of what made this project meaningful was exactly the fact that we weren't already experts. Figuring things out together, in real time, on open water, gave the trip a texture that a more polished, expert execution might have lacked. There's real value in attempting something genuinely difficult without already having all the answers, and I wouldn't trade the uncertainty we carried for a smoother, more confident version of the same five days.
What a Realistic Training Timeline Looks Like
If you're starting from close to zero paddling experience and want to attempt something like this, give yourself at least a few months of intermittent practice before your trip, not because you need to become an expert, but because a handful of sessions spread out over time builds more useful comfort with the board than the same number of sessions crammed into a single week beforehand. Focus those practice sessions on the specific conditions you're least comfortable with rather than repeating the same calm-water paddle every time. If open water intimidates you, find open water to practice on. If falling and remounting feels awkward, practice that specifically until it stops feeling that way.
What Michael and I Would Tell Our Past Selves
Looking back, the single biggest gap in our preparation wasn't paddling technique, it was underestimating how much decision-making the trip would actually require. We spent time before departure thinking about gear and logistics, and comparatively little time thinking through how we'd actually make calls about wind, swell, and route changes once we were out there. If you're preparing with limited experience, spend real time before your trip talking through hypothetical scenarios with your paddling partner, what would we do if the wind builds here, what's our plan if one of us falls in rough water, so those conversations aren't happening for the first time under actual pressure. Rehearsing those scenarios verbally, even briefly, seems to make the actual decision faster and calmer when the moment for it eventually arrives on the water.
What Confidence Actually Looked Like by the End
By day five, neither of us paddled with the same tentative caution that had marked the early miles out of Ski Run Marina. That shift wasn't dramatic or sudden. It built gradually, session by session, crossing by crossing, until handling a loaded board through moderate chop felt genuinely normal rather than something we were consciously managing every second. That's the real argument for attempting a trip like this with limited experience rather than waiting until you feel fully ready. The readiness tends to arrive during the trip itself, built from the actual demands of the water rather than from any amount of preparation beforehand.
Before You Close This Tab
What is your own honest assessment of your paddling experience relative to what a Lake Tahoe circumnavigation actually demands?
Have you practiced recovering from a fall or paddling seated in genuinely rough conditions before?
What would you do differently to prepare if you knew rough water was where your inexperience would show most?
Are you willing to accept a slower, more conservative pace in exchange for attempting this without years of prior experience?
Dalton Johnson is a photographer, filmmaker, and brand storyteller based in South Lake Tahoe, California. Over the past decade he has worked with brands including Patagonia, GoPro, Arc'teryx, Four Seasons, Nike, Rivian, and Ford Bronco across all seven continents. He is the creator of the Follow The Journey distribution framework, which has produced over one million organic views per 30-day cycle without paid media. His work includes two published books, an award-winning documentary that aired on PBS, and more than fifty commercial spots directed. He runs Stories by Dalton on Substack, read by more than 34,000 subscribers.