​The coronavirus pandemic has forced the majority of the world into lock-down. Everyone except 'key-workers' are to stay at home in isolation.  There's been a huge increase in the number of people working from home across a range of sectors, but what are you to do when your job & your hobbies lie in the great outdoors?

Outdoor instructors are a rare breed of people. We're not made to be inside and this is an incredibly tough time for us so we've created a survival kit full of resources for outdoor industry professionals to help keep you entertained and preserve your sanity during the quarantine. 

Here's a load of links of things to do - ENJOY! 👍

​Watch Outdoor Films

There's a wealth of great films out there to watch about extreme sports and nature but it's difficult to find them all in one place right? Wrong. 

Click here to access 100 outdoor films to sink your teeth into and keep you dreaming about the day you can go outside again.

Here's our personal favourite:

Stay active.

Fitness goes hand in hand with the nature of our work and being so active on the job means that we often taken it for granted. Yes, we can get out for a walk or a run but besides that it's important to stay fit and devise a training routine suitable to your sport(s). Here's a list of sport-specific workouts & resoucres you can do from home:

Climbing:

• 19 Climbing home workouts for when you hate the gym
• Home climbing workout with Tom Randall
• Floor-based core training for climbing

Kayak:

• Get in shape for kayaking
• Kayak home workout
• Core exercises for paddlers

Surfing:

• ​7 Home-based exercises to improve your surfing
• Top 20 surf fitness exercises for power, strength & stability
• Urban Surfer's home workout

If these workouts don't do it for you, get onto Mr. Motivator's YouTube channel  and subscribe for daily workouts.

 
Find adventure in a book.

Whatever your sport is, from surfing to ice fishing, someone's bound to have written a book about it. Here's a rundown of our top adventure books to read to keep the spirit of adventure alive during the days of lock-down:

Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
William Finnegan's autobiography documents his years of travelling the globe in search of waves. We all know what it's like to be obsessive about our sport, but Finnegan takes it to the next level - his love of surfing borders on addiction and highlights the sacrifices we make in order to pursue the things we love the most. From start to finish this book is one epic love letter to surfing and the ocean.

Here's the opening chapter to get you started

Running the Amazon
This one's for all the paddlers out there; Joe Kane's account of paddling the Amazon from source to sea is one of the maddest real-life adventures you'll ever read. All kinds of drama unfolds as a team of twelve paddlers, medics, writers, explorers (most of them strangers) attempt the impossible in one of the world's most hostile places.

Check out the opening chapter here

Eiger Dreams - Ventures Among Men & Mountains
To be fair, anything by Jon Krakauer is going to be amazing but his collection of essays on mountaineering and climbing is particularly good. The pick of the essays has to be 'On Being Tentbound' - it's about being trapped inside a tent for 10 days during bad weather and is especially poignant during isolation.

Here's an excerpt from Eiger Dreams

Shantaram
I haven't finished it yet so can't give a great review but you'll have to trust me - as far as novels go, this one's badass & I hope Netflix or HBO throw some money at it soon.

Here's a taster

We hope this guide is useful and fights off the boredom! 

Most importantly though, stay safe & stay positive 😃

Things will return to normal, things will get better. For now the best we can do is support each other inside and outside of our industry.
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Portugal has been long famous as a holiday destination due to its incredible culture, delicious food and cosmopolitan cities. The Algarve especially has become one of Europe's most popular destinations amongst tourists and who can blame them?  The Algarve boasts amazing weather, beautiful beaches and wonderful friendly locals - but the thing that attracted us most is its stunning coast.

In the western Algarve, the area that we have come to know as home, we have the perfect conditions for coasteering. Stretching north from Sagres we have the wild & rugged west coast. We can't always go coasteering here due to the predominant north-west ocean swells hitting the shoreline, but every now and again, when the waves permit, this area provides phenomenal cliff jumping and awesome rock formations for climbing and exploring.

The South coast between Sagres and Lagos is equally stunning with small fishing villages such as Salema and sandy beaches. In the summer, the sea is often much calmer here and the shoreline is easy to explore. In most areas the rock is a soft sandstone making it incredibly difficult and dangerous for climbing, but between these areas there are much stronger bands of limestone into which the ocean has carved great caves and archways - the perfect playground for coasteering. The south coast is one of our favourite places to go coasteering in the Algarve.

Then there's the mid-coast of Sagres. The tip of the peninsula is surely one of the most beautiful coasts in Europe, if not the world. The cliffs are spectacular with plenty of hidden caves and coves and huge rocky platforms making in a cliff jumping paradise. The way that the land drops into the ocean here is really dramatic and it's easy to see how people once believed that this was the end of the world. Coasteering here is
awesome - you really get the feeling of being on an adventure in the wilderness. 

Although coasteering has become massive in the UK, we often get asked exactly what it is out here in Portugal. It's a strange old word that doesn't translate too easily and doesn't really do justice to how awesome the sport is. 

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Coasteering:
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Well that's all good & well but here at Poseidon Adventure we believe a picture speaks a thousand words, and if a picture speaks a thousand words, a video must be worth a million, and that's why we made this point of view video to explain exactly what coasteering is:
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It's time to get a little bit geeky and talk about our favourite bits of coasteering equipment. 🤓

The ocean and the coast is a constantly changing environment and we always want to have the best kit at hand when faced with a new challenge on a coasteering adventure.

Here's a run down of the most essential items of kit for coasteering:

We also suggest wearing shorts to protect the wetsuits against the rocks and also we offer gloves to protect hands when climbing, but don't insist on guests wearing them. It's all down to personal preference! ​😊

We've finally gone and done it. After hours of scrubbing through all of our GoPro footage from 2019, we've managed to edit a short video of our season! 

Sadly one GoPro sacrificed its life in the making of this video and now finds itself in a watery grave somewhere on the south coast between Sagres and Lagos. RIP GoPro - you will be sadly missed and fondly remembered.

So check out the video below and see if one of your jumps made the final cut!

You can also subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more videos of people jumping off things. ​😛

It's been an awesome few weeks here in the Algarve with great weather, waves and we've found plenty of things to do when we haven't been coasteering, from surfing on the west coast, exploring south coast beaches between Sagres and Lagos and sea fishing! Here's a short run-down of what we've been up to this month:

Coasteering
Let's start with the most important activity on our agenda. September has provided some incredible conditions for us - warm water, a little bit of swell, beautiful weather and we've certainly taken advantage of it. Our highlight was with our big group from Belgium staying at Hostel on the Hill. Here's a snap of them getting stuck into a spicy sea-level traverse in Sagres:

 Surfing
One of the best things about the Western Algarve is its waves and September has really delivered the goods so far. When we haven't been busy cliff jumping or exploring caves, we've been getting in on the west coast and making the most of the conditions (sometimes wetsuit free!) Wave of the week goes to our friend Fin! Check out his instagram here

Fishing
Between all the coasteering and surfing, we even found some time to go sea fishing in Sagres with SeaXplorer Sagres and had the best time catching fish out on the open ocean with the view of the coastline in front of us. On the way out we even had a close encounter with a pod of dolphins!

​We often get asked what goes on during our Coasteering session in Sagres. We don't always like to reveal the surprise of the adventure before you try it for yourself, but here's a little peak at the layout of one of our tours:

 
Once everybody has been briefed and checked, we're ready to start Coasteering! And what better way to start than with a jump. All of our Coasteering routes have a number of options to choose from when it comes to cliff jumping and rock climbing. If you're not so keen on jumping from too high, no problem - we always have a more friendly jump. 😉

​Likewise with our rock climbing, there's always an easier, alternative route if heights aren't your thing and we canalways help by showing you where those secret handholds are hiding!

Once we've got used to jumping, and have got the technique nailed down, it's time to start exploring the coastline, finding hidden caves and swimming inside them.

This particular tour also involves swimming to a hidden beach through perfectly clear water and visiting a deserted island in the middle of the bay, where you get a unique view of the awesome sea cliffs.

Although there's plenty of jumps en route during this Coasteering tour, the real adrenaline kick comes right at the end when we enter what we like to call the 'Big Jump Zone'. This hidden bay is the best place to put your jumping technique to the test with jumps as high is 10 meters!

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Feel like giving it a go...?
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Get 10% off your Coasteering Adventure this September when you book directly through our website. ​😺

We've been having a great summer so far at Poseidon Adventure. Our coasteering has taken us to some spectacular new locations and allowed us to practise a few new moves! Today was especially awesome. We teamed up with Markus and Tim who dropped into Sagres for the day to join us and teach us a thing or two about back flips! They really had no fear when it came to coasteering and cliff jumping and fully embraced the Poseidon Adventure experience. To honour them, here's a short YouTube clip from their tour 🔥🔥🔥 

One major part of Coasteering is rock climbing - most of our climbing takes place at a low level, above the sea in the inter-tidal zone. We also do it with full Coasteering safety equipment. It can get a little bit wild sometimes, especially when there's a little bit of swell kicking around! It's also great training for another of our passions - Deep water soloing.

Deep water soloing (sometimes called psychobloc) is exactly what it sounds like - climbing free above deep water so that if you fall you'll get a nice soft landing (sometimes!) 😂

We are lucky enough to live in a spot with plenty of opportunity to practise DWS in our spare time. When we aren't Coasteering we're always on the look out for new routes to push our climbing.

DWS is a great way to test your nerve, as well as your climbing ability. You can really push yourself on harder routes that normally you wouldn't consider possible to climb solo. It's perfect in the summer when you want to climb hard but also have chance to cool off.