Rock’n’Roll Weekend – NSW See Kayak Club – 13-14 March 2026

The Rock’n’Roll event is the NSW Sea Kayak Club’s premier annual gathering for paddlers, showcasing their enthusiasm for kayaking and camaraderie. It features trips, training, talks, and information sessions, with a strong focus on socializing and community building. The event attracts paddlers from various Australian states,.

The weekend aims to present a wide variety of experiences and speakers so there is something for paddlers of all levels of experience.

On both mornings many of those with Paddle Australia leadership qualifications met for breakfast and decided amongst themselves which paddles and training sessions would be offered and who would lead each. There was no shortage of possibilities in the beautiful Eden area. Paddles included benign river trips, short and long  sea trips, rock gardening, rescue training, rolling and more. ACC leaders led some of the sea trips and supervised rolling sessions.

The paddles and training sessions were conducted each morning. Afternoons were taken up with a wide variety of speakers and workshops. These included sessions on such topics as navigation, boat repair, skill development (one of which was taken by ACC’s Hugh Stewart), boat design, how to polish kayaks, great paddling destinations in SA (great promotion from ACC’s Phil Dodridge) and many others. Often sessions were held concurrently, so we couldn’t see all we wished.

There were also talks given by a number of people who had undertaken exceptional paddles, including Richard Barnes, who paddled from Australia to New Zealand and Sandy Robson, who paddled from Germany to Australia.

Saturday evening was the Rock’n’Roll dinner, with Paul Caffyn as a fascinating guest speaker. Paul had paddled the coast of Alaska, amongst other things. The diners were also entertained by “The Pogies”; which was a ‘competition’ of short videos made by paddlers. (Some of our ACC videos would have been stiff competition!)

Overall, it was a very good weekend, but it was a long drive for a two-day experience. Most of the ACC members who attended agreed that, to make it worthwhile in future, we would arrange some ‘before’ and/or ‘after’ paddles to justify the travel.