One Summer’s Paddling
Kayak expeditions in the South Australian Sea, December 1980–February 1981
Circumnavigating Kangaroo Island, 21 December–12 January
Port Lincoln to Adelaide, 23 January–2 February
At 40 years: A downloadable PDF
Forty years on, in the summar of 2020–2021 I’ve put a slightly revised version, with rescanned images and without notes no longer relevant, into a 19 page, 1 MB PDF: One Summer’s Paddling
Introduction
Sea kayaking began in earnest in South Australia in the 1970s. There had been some sea paddling earlier, inluding a voyage from Goolwa, out through the Mouth, to Outer Harbor in March 1934 to complete a journey down the Murray from Albury in a decked canoe, and a crossing from Cape Jervis to Cuttlefish Bay in the late 1940s by two Scouts in a frame and canvas kayak. The then recently formed SA Canoeing Association organised a trip from Cape Jervis to Adelaide in 1973, using KW7s and other white water boats.
In the mid-1970s the first real sea kayaks began to appear: the North Sea Tourer, from a mould supplied by the Derwent Canoe Club in Tasmania; the Trylon Sea Hawk, commercially built in Adelaide; and the Valley Canoe Products Nordkapp, also commercially built. Of the three, the Nordkapp, especially when it became available with bulkheads and hatches (that system was new then, in fact my Nordkapp was the first Australian example so fitted), was the best performing, and soon became the sea kayak to have. These days, we are spoiled for choice.
South Australia has a long and interesting coastline. Some of it is protected in the gulfs, much of it is exposed to the Southern Ocean, and there are numerous islands to explore. Most of the early paddling took place in the Gulf near Adelaide, but there were several obvious ‘targets’ for future expeditions. One of them was Backstairs Passage, the crossing to Kangaroo Island, and we did the first two way crossing in January 1978. Later that year we made the first crossing to a group of islands, the Sir Joseph Banks Group.
There were two big targets: a circumnavigation of Kangaroo Island, and a crossing from Port Lincoln to Adelaide. At the twentieth anniversary (January 2001), these pages tell the story of those two expeditions. At the time, I wrote two accounts, a short one which was published in the British magazine Canoeing (No 42, May 1981), and a longer one submitted to the Australian Outdoors magazine. That one was not published, but it forms the basis of this document: I have made only minor changes, but added some notes and the daily log.
I long ago lost count of the number of times I’ve crossed Backstairs Passage, and I’ve visited the Sir Joseph Banks Group three more times, been around Wilsons Promontory in Victoria, out into the Pacific with a NSW group, to Fraser Island in Queensland, to Flinders Island off our West Coast, and so on.
We hoped that our expeditions would inspire others to take up paddling at sea, but the inspiration was slow to take effect. I could not, for instance, find a team to visit Neptune Island in 1983 (I went on a Tasmanian Three Hummocks Island expedition instead). However Malcolm Hamilton and Phil Read were sufficiently enthused to make a second circumnavigation in 1987, and Malcolm has since gone on to make other major expeditions and form a sea kayaking business. Around him has formed a team which has now paddled to Neptune Island (1998), crossed Bass Strait (1999), and visited other interesting places.
In that sense, the torch (or is it paddle?) has been passed. I’m happy with that, and to have been part of the beginnings of modern sea kayaking in Australia.
There are four more pages to this account. The next deals with the circumnavigation of Kangaroo Island, then the crossing from Port Lincoln to Adelaide, a page with the daily log (and map), and a page of notes of the cameras and my kayak.