Paddleboard Prodigy

At only 14, Olivia Mason is helping her family turn Perthshire into a paddleboarding paradise

- by CHAE STRATHIE

TEENAGERS, eh? All they want to do is laze around playing video games, lie in their beds until 4pm and occasionally grunt at you when you have the audacity to ask them a question. If that's what you think, then you clearly haven't met Olivia Mason.

This 14-year-old tips that stereotype on its head – and a lot of that is down to a big oval board and a paddle.

Olivia is an instructor at her mum's Perthshire-based business, Adventure Paddleboarding, which makes her one of youngest – if not the youngest – paddleboard instructors in Scotland.

To say that her mum Lucy and dad Greig, who is also an instructor in the business, are proud is something of an understatement.

“We're super proud, but what she's achieved doesn't surprise us.” Lucy beams. “She's always been like that. She's totally driven. In fact, I've never met a young person so driven!”

It’s perhaps not surprising that Olivia has ended up following her parents down the aquatic route, given the fact that she was only four when she first joined her mum on a paddleboard.

She was too small to remember that, but she does recall when her love affair with the board properly began.

“I got my first paddleboard for my birthday when I was about nine, and I remember being really, really happy about that,” Olivia says. “We would go out on lochs to begin with — like Loch Faskally and Loch of Clunie — and it was brilliant. It was one of my favourite things straight away.”

You can tell by speaking to Olivia how much paddleboarding means to her and what she gets from it.