The Saltwater Festival has been created to bring people together over their love of Saltwater sport, music and food.

The sporting aspect is the centre piece and is aimed at highlighting both, sporting excellence and the unbridled rush of just getting out and doing it.  The Saltwater Festival is set to showcase the courage of the beginner through to the skill of the elite with everybody joining in the celebration of simply being in the water and doing it.

With most sporting pursuits our closest support crew (partners, children, family, friends) are usually either travelling with us or waiting at home.  At The Saltwater Festival we want everyone to be at the event and enjoying the sensation of being outdoors in a magical environment and participating in something truly memorable.  Therefore the race courses are all designed to finish in the midst of the festival.  When you cross the finish line you are already at the party.

The rules and regulations have been created and decided upon by athletes to provide for fun racing that is challenging and exciting to watch and be a part of.  We are endeavouring to make it all downhill (so to speak), in other words, it will be all or mostly downwind or down current.

When it comes to rules, we do have the normal “judges decision is final” option, but there is prize money, ratings points, personal bests, pride and the occasional ego involved, we do have a simple appeals process, after which “judges decision is final”.  Preferably we would leave the ego’s at home and stick with the bigger picture of the festival, which of course is to come together and enjoy the sport and the festivities rather than take our frustrations out on fellow competitors and officials (humans too) if things don’t go exactly the way we would like.

Our main disciplines are the fast growing sports of Stand-up board paddling, Ocean board paddling, Ocean Ski paddling and One Man Outriggers.  All of these disciplines have seen huge growth with Stand Up Paddling and Ocean Ski paddling attracting increasingly huge numbers of paddlers around the world (about time).  We have drawn our rules and category classifications from the industry leaders in each of these fields to keep heading towards a truly world standard.  Some of our events may also double as a leg of the current World tours in these disciplines and our aim is to create a world series champion within The Saltwater Festival series.

So following the spirit of this, here are our course rules, regulations, categories, check in times and anything else you need to know to leave the tension at home and enjoy a great fun weekend.