Georgia Rivers Uses 2026 Paddles to Grow River Protectors

Georgia Rivers spent spring 2026 running weekend canoe and kayak trips that double as a recruiting drive for river protection. The Athens 501c3 opened the year with five guided weekends, kayak-fishing classes, and registration fees range from $75 to $390. Scholarships sat on top of those prices. The next large camp trip is a 36-mile Fall Float on the Flint, Oct. 9-11.

Executive director Rena Ann Peck has said the method in one chain: people who get on the water care about it, and people who care protect it, including the public’s right to go there. The 2026 calendar stacked that bet with America250 history stops, new camps south of Atlanta, and, after July, a swamp that carries World Heritage status.

Five Spring Weekends on Georgia Rivers

Registration for the spring weekends and day trips opened Dec. 22, 2025, at 8 a.m. and ran until each trip sold out. Most outings were capped at 30 to 40 people. The group, which is Georgia DNR’s nonprofit partner on the Georgia Water Trails Network, listed more than two dozen paddles, fishing days, and beginner classes across the year. The five spring weekends were the spine.

THE SPRING 2026 WEEKEND SLATE

Fish Georgia, run by coordinator Kendon Townsel, put beginner kayak-fishing days on Lake Allatoona on March 28 and on the Chestatee River on April 18. Later classes sat on the Chattahoochee and, in September, on the Flint at Big Lazer Creek Wildlife Management Area. Beginner “Kayaking 101” days opened May 16, National Safe Boating Day. Joe Cook, Paddle Georgia coordinator since 2005 and author of seven River User’s Guides since 2012, led the weekend series with volunteer instructors.

Scholarships Run From $100 to Nearly $500

On Feb. 23, Peck said boat rental, gear, and the entry fee still keep many people off these trips. The group answered with full and partial scholarships for qualifying paddlers, funded by sponsors, and with a rule that most weekends would be co-led by minority paddlers who hold American Canoe Association instructor cards.

WHO THE AID IS BUILT FOR

• The door: Women, people of color, recent immigrants, and low-income individuals and families can seek aid on day trips, weekends, fishing classes, and Paddle Georgia.
• The value: Awards run from $100 on day trips to nearly $500 on the week-long Paddle Georgia journey and on some fishing trips.
• Teachers: K-12 Georgia educators can seek a separate Paddle Georgia award that includes environmental curriculum and Georgia Adopt-a-Stream training.
• The form: Applicants apply for a scholarship through the group’s RegFox form.

Janina Edwards, an ACA Level 2 river kayaking instructor, said the weekends also open Black cultural history from a boat. Lisa George, an ACA instructor and volunteer senior admin for the Georgia chapter of Black Women Who, co-led both the Ebenezer weekend and the Flint float. George’s group’s work is to get women of color into outdoor places they have been told are not for them. That is the same gap Peck named in the paddlesports and river-advocacy ranks.

What Paddlers Walk at Ebenezer Crossing

The March 13-15 weekend was the first of two America250 trips. Ebenezer Creek, just upstream from Savannah, is one of four state-designated scenic rivers. The route is all flatwater. Camp sat at New Ebenezer Retreat Center, across from Jerusalem Lutheran Church, the oldest church building in Georgia, finished in 1769. The group walked the church and the Salzburger settlement story; those Protestant refugees founded New Ebenezer in 1733.

The creek is also the site of the Ebenezer Creek Massacre. In December 1864, formerly enslaved people following Sherman’s army were left on the wrong bank when Union troops pulled a pontoon bridge. Georgia Rivers’ trip notes say paddlers stop and walk the causeway of that crossing, and that the outcry fed the Union’s short-lived “40 acres and a mule” order. Day two moved to Brier Creek in Tuckahoe Wildlife Management Area and to the Revolutionary War battlefield where British forces broke a Patriot line and men fled through the swamp toward the Savannah River.

Peck put the history pitch in one line: “We’re excited to celebrate America’s 250th birthday with these river trips. Our history revolves around our rivers.” Edwards put the other half: “These trips are a great opportunity to connect to Black cultural history through the vehicle of kayaking.” The second America250 day trip, May 23 on the Broad River, paired Revolutionary War stories of Nancy Hart with shoals spider lilies at Anthony Shoals.

Ebenezer Creek is not a closed chapter in law. On Feb. 19, the Senate Transportation Committee heard more than an hour of debate on SB 511, the Georgia River Heritage Act, and did not vote. Chairman Greg Dolezal directed staff to ask legislative counsel whether the public has a right to boat on streams classed as non-navigable. The bill names Ebenezer Creek in Effingham County among the small waters where outfitters and anglers now work. Cook told the committee, “You have the opportunity in this bill to clarify that public easement to support the commerce that is now taking place on our inland rivers.” Putting 30 to 40 new people on that creek in March was, in that light, not a holiday listing. It was a constituency on the water.

Below Atlanta, New Campsites Meet the River

The May 1-3 Chattahoochee Camp and Paddle used the Trust for Public Land’s 48-mile Camp and Paddle Trail, which runs from Peachtree Creek in Atlanta to McIntosh Reserve in Carroll County. Georgia Rivers and TPL sent the group to the newest paddle-in campsites along the river at Campbellton and Chattahoochee Hills. Gear could ride in the boats or go by staff shuttle. Breakfasts and dinners were catered; paddlers packed their own lunches.

THE RIVERLANDS CAMP LAYER

• The park: New RiverLands Park covers 260 acres and includes an ADA kayak launch, a group camp, restrooms, a shower, and a covered picnic area.
• The 2025 test: Cook led more than two dozen paddlers on the first organized use of the camps in April 2025 and called them signature Atlanta river destinations.
• The wider plan: TPL describes 100 miles of trails, 19 cities, 7 counties, 43 water access points, and 8 campsites along the Chattahoochee RiverLands.
• The old knock: Carroll County’s trip page says this reach had been written off as a sewage-defiled water body; metro treatment upgrades brought recreation back.

Walt Ray, TPL’s Chattahoochee program director, said the project opened a river that had been hard to find and that the work was about equitable access. Peck, at the 2025 ribbon-cutting season, said camps like these can be copied on other Georgia rivers, the way they already draw tourism in other states. No other Georgia river had public paddle-in camps of this kind when the trail opened. The 2026 trip was the second year on that infrastructure, not a ribbon-cutting.

The Okefenokee Joined the World Heritage List

The April 10-12 St. Marys weekend sent people south when north Georgia was still cold. They camped under live oaks at historic Traders Hill, paddled 18 miles of blackwater along the Georgia-Florida line, and had an optional day in the Okefenokee. That swamp is the headwaters of the St. Marys and the Suwannee. On July 25, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee inscribed Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge, more than 400,000 acres, as a World Heritage site. It is Georgia’s first. Georgia Rivers is fiscal sponsor of the Okefenokee Protection Alliance, so the listing sits inside the same shop that had already been taking paying paddlers into the prairies.

November’s swamp weekends now land on that designation. The Nov. 6-8 Okefenokee-Suwannee trip runs two days and 22 miles from Stephen Foster State Park toward Fargo. The Nov. 20-22 Okefenokee Adventure works the east-side prairies and a west-side passage on the Suwannee route, with lodging at Suwannee River Eco Lodge. Scholarship notes for those trips add a history layer the spring weekend did not: all-Black Civilian Conservation Corps camps that cut and kept early recreational canoe trails in the swamp in the late 1930s.

On Sept. 17, the group’s Atlanta gala celebrated the World Heritage designation and honored the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. The party sat 16 days before the Flint launch. The swamp trips in November are no longer a regional curiosity on a state events page. They are guided access to a site the U.N. committee put on a global list.

How Kayak Fees Fund River Protection

Paddle Georgia, the 21st annual week, ran June 14-20 on the Cartecay, Coosawattee, and Oostanaula, 95 miles from Ellijay toward Rome. Adult fees ran from $160 for two days to $460 for seven, with youth discounts. Planners said paddlers could dip into seven rivers along the route. Georgia Rivers has said that since 2005, Paddle Georgia events have engaged more than 7,000 people and generated more than $1 million for river protection and water-trail work. A portion of each fee, the group says, goes to advocate for water policy and for public access on Georgia’s 70,000 miles of rivers and streams.

When people are connected to our rivers they care about them. When they care about our rivers, they protect them and they protect the public’s right to access them.

Rena Ann Peck, executive director, Georgia Rivers

Peck has used a shorter version of the same idea on the fishing program: the more rivers the group connects anglers to, the more protectors those rivers gain. Day trips through the summer carried that logic into folk-art stops (Howard Finster’s Paradise Gardens after the Chattooga, St. EOM’s Pasaquan after Columbus whitewater) and into harvest paddles, including an Oconee muscadine float near Athens on Sept. 12. A free Georgia River Guide app, in the Android and Apple stores, is the unguided twin of the paid weekends: maps and access notes for people who never join a shuttle line. Proceeds from the guided fees, the March release said, support the same protect-and-connect mission.

Fall Float on the Flint Starts Oct. 9

For more than a decade the group has gone back to the lower Flint in the fall. The 2026 edition is Oct. 9-11, 36 miles in two long days of about 18 miles each, with 6 to 9 hours on the water depending on speed. The route is mostly flat with shoals, limestone bluffs, and blue-hole springs. Fossils turn up. Camp is at Rocky Bend Flint River Retreat, with toilets and showers; cabins and RV sites are extra. Fees were slated in the summer around $200 for youth and $360 for adults and were to include six catered meals, shuttles, maps, a shirt or other swag, and a boat decal. Registration closed Oct. 2 or when the trip filled. Cook, George, Lesford Duncan of the Outdoor Foundation, and ACA instructor Mike Henry are listed as leaders. The same scholarship door still applies.

THE REST OF THE 2026 WATER CALENDAR

1. Oct. 9-11, 2026: Fall Float on the Flint, 36 miles out of the Albany stretch, two nights at Rocky Bend.
2. Nov. 1, 2026: Savannah River Persimmon Hunt and Jam, an 8-mile day paddle near Augusta that ends at a jam kettle.
3. Nov. 6-8, 2026: Okefenokee-Suwannee River Adventure, 22 miles from Stephen Foster State Park toward Fargo.
4. Nov. 20-22, 2026: Okefenokee Adventure, east prairies and a west-side Suwannee passage, with six meals and lodge beds.

The Flint weekend is the same machine as March on Ebenezer, only with limestone instead of cypress and with a World Heritage swamp waiting in November. Cook will still be on the water. The scholarships will still be the way in for people who cannot float $360. And the fees, as they have since 2005, will still be asked to do more than buy supper and a shuttle.