A paddling legend
Caffyn was born in Sydney and grew up by the Brisbane River, where he learned to paddle with a local canoe club. After leaving school in1965, Caffyn qualified as a geologist and moved to New Zealand’s West Coast region, where he spent weekends adventuring, caving and mountaineering.
Out of geology work in 1975, Caffyn qualified as a secondary school teacher and got a job at Greymouth High School. Part of this entailed teaching outdoor education, including white-water kayaking. Caffyn’s friend Shaun Leyland had introduced him to white-water paddling and it was during a winter paddle down the Upper Grey River that the idea for a sea kayak expedition was born.
While sea-going kayaks were relatively rare then, that changed in 1974 when Frank Goodman, owner of England’s Valley Canoe Products, designed a round bilge 5.7m sea kayak specifically for expedition voyaging. Based on the traditional West Greenland Eskimo seal-hunting kayak, his Nordkapp kayak had a payload of 90kg.
Colin Mortlock, leading a British team, paddled Nordkapps on a 500-mile self-supported expedition along Norway’s coast. Two years later, Nelson-based canoe builder Grahame Sisson imported a Nordkapp mould into New Zealand and began building them under license.
In 1977 a trio of Nelson kayakers attempted to paddle the 300nm around Fiordland using Sisson’s Nordkapps, but bad weather and other issues prevented them from finishing.
Meantime Caffyn (‘Knuckles’
