Sailing club

Koombana Bay Sailing Club

Bunbury, WA

Sailing club

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About

Koombana Bay Sailing Club at a glance

Service area: Bunbury, WA

Club type: Yacht Club (mixed)
Australian Sailing: Affiliated · 2025-26
Primary classes: Yacht Club (mixed)
Kids learn to sail: Available

About Koombana Bay Sailing Club

The judges of Western Australia's 2021 Sailing Club of the Year award could hardly have missed the numbers coming out of Bunbury: membership up 114 per cent, an expanded junior program, and two women — Commodore Sarah Twigger, with Deri Price as her Vice Commodore — running the show. Koombana Bay Sailing Club took the honour, and the citation's emphasis on inclusive opportunity captured what this volunteer-run South West club had been quietly building for years. By 2022 the roll stood at 496 members, 189 of them social members whom the club actively encourages onto the water through SailPass, Australian Sailing's introductory membership. What distinguishes Koombana Bay from many regional clubs is breadth. Under one burgee it fields keelboats, catamarans and off-the-beach dinghies, all racing under handicap, and its Saturday program splits into four classes so that juniors in training dinghies, senior dinghy sailors, cat crews and keelboat teams each get meaningful competition. The keelboat scene is built around the S80, a Swarbrick design of eight metres familiar across WA waters, racing alongside bigger cruiser-racers, while the catamaran fleet carries a long Nacra tradition that today spans Windrush 14s, Maricats and Nacra Infusion F18s. Set in Anchorage Cove on Bunbury's North Shore, the club celebrated its seventieth anniversary in October 2024, and the milestone felt earned rather than nostalgic. This is a club that grew from one newcomer knocking on two friends' doors in 1954 into a modern operation whose clubhouse, permanent jetty and launching ramp serve a membership still rising. Australian Sailing has featured it as a club in focus, and the profile that emerges is of a regional sailing community that decided growth and inclusiveness were the same project — then proved it.

Training and sailing programs

Learn-to-sail work at Koombana Bay is neither an add-on nor a marketing line; the expansion of junior sailing sat at the heart of the initiatives recognised by its 2021 state club-of-the-year award. The club runs Learn to Sail courses alongside keelboat crewing and helming programmes, all delivered by Australian Sailing qualified instructors. The keelboat arm is a particular point of difference: trainees learn their craft aboard an S80, the same Swarbrick-designed eight-metre class that races in the club's own fleet, so a graduate can step almost seamlessly from the training boat onto a competitive start line. For younger sailors, the club promotes a thoughtful ladder of classes. The O'pen Bic gives beginners a lively modern trainer; the Mirror offers a more traditional two-handed pathway; the Jay Dee junior dinghy remains a West Australian staple; and the Mudlark — a WA-designed seven-foot single-handed trainer for six-to-twelve-year-olds — rounds out the junior options. That spread lets families match a child to the right boat at the right stage rather than forcing everyone through a single class, and it reflects decades of dinghy culture at Bunbury stretching back to the VJs and Sharpies of the club's earliest fleets. Adults are not an afterthought. Keelboat crewing and helming courses give grown-up beginners a realistic route into the sport without buying a boat, and the club's use of SailPass lowers the threshold for social members curious about trying a sail. Once hooked, new sailors find Wednesday twilight sessions and Saturday racing waiting for them, with four handicap classes ensuring that a fresh crew in a small dinghy and an experienced keelboat team both find their level. In short, the pathway from first lesson to Saturday starter is short, well signposted and run by people who took it themselves.

Sailing waters

Bunbury's geography hands Koombana Bay Sailing Club a rare double act. The bay itself faces north, tucked in behind the breakwater and outer harbour works, so it lies sheltered from the prevailing south-westerly weather that batters much of the capes coastline. Inside, members enjoy smooth, protected water through the summer — ideal for junior training, twilight sailing and off-the-beach racing. Yet step past the breakwater and the Indian Ocean is right there, and because the club sits at Anchorage Cove within the harbour precinct, keelboats can head offshore without the mast-lowering gymnastics that estuary clubs endure. The club itself makes much of that freedom, and it shapes the character of its keelboat fleet. The sailing week is built around the water on the doorstep. Wednesday twilight sailing makes use of long summer evenings on the flat bay, while Saturdays belong to racing across the four classes — junior and senior dinghies, keelboats large and small, and the catamaran divisions. The cat fleets, with their Nacra heritage and mixed handicap racing among Windrush 14s, Maricats and Infusion F18s, relish the open reaches the bay provides, and the S80s and cruiser-racers can mix bay courses with ocean passages as the calendar dictates. Shore facilities have grown with the club's ambitions. Today's members work from a clubhouse, a permanent jetty and a launching ramp — infrastructure that traces its lineage to the purpose-built clubhouse opened in 1967 and the jetty and ramp constructed in the same era. For a South West regional club, the package is substantial: protected training water, direct ocean access, and a hard base in Anchorage Cove from which nearly five hundred members now sail. Little wonder Australian Sailing's cameras came calling for a closer look.

Club history

It started with a newcomer asking an obvious question. When John Allen arrived in Bunbury in 1954 and discovered the town had no sailing club, he recruited two friends and set about fixing the omission. The founding meeting of the Bunbury Sailing Club convened on 29 August that year at the Bunbury Rowing Club, with John Roberts in the chair and Allen taking the Secretary-Treasurer role; joining as a foundation member cost two guineas. Progress came fast. Official opening day on the North Shore came on 4 December, Mayor FJ Withers doing the honours; more than a hundred spectators watched the first race, and Roberts' Mustang sailed into the record books as its winner. A fortnight later, at the eighth general meeting on 18 December, members resolved to rename the organisation Koombana Bay Sailing Club and elected Norman Parker as Commodore. The building phase was characteristically enterprising. A £200 loan financed the first clubhouse, built around a tubular steel frame sourced for £83/10/- from Fremantle firm Tubular Steel Constructions, and within four months the young club held land, a clubhouse, thirty-four senior and junior members and seven associates. A decade of patient negotiation for a land grant followed, culminating in a new $25,000 clubhouse — supported by a $12,000 loan — which WA Premier Sir David Brand declared open on 5 March 1967, with a permanent jetty and launching ramp built in the same period. On the water, the early fleets were Vaucluse Juniors bought second-hand for £45 to £60 apiece, joined from 1959 by Lightweight Sharpies, Colin Goodlad's Robese being the first of that class in Bunbury. By the 1970s the club was hosting major titles, among them the 18th Skate National titles and the 35th Commonwealth VJ titles. Seventy years after Allen's knock on his friends' doors, in October 2024, members gathered to celebrate an anniversary that traced all the way back to that two-guinea beginning.

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