About
Koonawarra Bay Sailing Club at a glance
Few sailing clubs have reinvented themselves as completely as Koonawarra Bay. Founded in the 1950s as a conventional dinghy and catamaran club on the western shore of Lake Illawarra, it now centres its sailing on two very modern niches: radio-controlled yachts and foiling windsurfers. The radio fleet is the heartbeat — International One Metres racing on Saturdays and Tuesdays, the big A Class boats on Thursdays, everything starting at midday — while the windsurfers bring speed and spectacle when the westerly gets up. The club is quick to note that all classes remain welcome, a holdover from decades in which its members sailed just about everything that floats, from dinghies to the small catamarans the club once owned for members to use. The character is small-scale and welcoming rather than corporate. Commodore Ralph Skea and Secretary Jon Pinkerton head a club affiliated with the NSW Radio Yachting Association, and the membership count isn't published — but the activity level speaks clearly enough, with organised sailing three days a week all year. Midday starts leave the morning free for boat preparation and tuning on the club's big grassed rigging areas, and the elevated point
Service area: Kanahooka, NSW
- Club type
- Other
- Australian Sailing
- Affiliated · 2025-26
- Primary classes
- Other
- Kids learn to sail
- Available
About Koonawarra Bay Sailing Club
Few sailing clubs have reinvented themselves as completely as Koonawarra Bay. Founded in the 1950s as a conventional dinghy and catamaran club on the western shore of Lake Illawarra, it now centres its sailing on two very modern niches: radio-controlled yachts and foiling windsurfers. The radio fleet is the heartbeat — International One Metres racing on Saturdays and Tuesdays, the big A Class boats on Thursdays, everything starting at midday — while the windsurfers bring speed and spectacle when the westerly gets up. The club is quick to note that all classes remain welcome, a holdover from decades in which its members sailed just about everything that floats, from dinghies to the small catamarans the club once owned for members to use. The character is small-scale and welcoming rather than corporate. Commodore Ralph Skea and Secretary Jon Pinkerton head a club affiliated with the NSW Radio Yachting Association, and the membership count isn't published — but the activity level speaks clearly enough, with organised sailing three days a week all year. Midday starts leave the morning free for boat preparation and tuning on the club's big grassed rigging areas, and the elevated point gives both competitors and spectators a clear view of the whole course. Koonawarra actively pitches itself as a regatta host — "Let us host your regatta" is the standing invitation — and hires out its clubhouse for functions, a practical income stream that helps keep a volunteer club afloat. Among Lake Illawarra's string of sailing clubs — the Illawarra Yacht Club at Warrawong, Port Kembla, Oak Flats and Windang — Koonawarra holds the western-shore position, and its members have made that exposure to the westerly part of the club's identity.
Training and sailing programs
Instruction at Koonawarra Bay follows its own path: the club's classroom is the radio-yacht start line. With organised racing three days a week — IOM on Saturday and Tuesday, A Class on Thursday, all from 12 midday — newcomers get more structured sailing time here than most full-size clubs offer, and the learning curve in radio yachting is famously compressed: the tactics, rules and wind-reading of keelboat racing, mastered from dry land with a transmitter in hand. Other radio classes are welcome, so sailors arriving with a DF95 or a vintage Marblehead can find a start. For those new to sailing in any form, the club keeps things personal and informal — basic instruction can be arranged for the inexperienced, and new members are always welcome. There are no accredited Australian Sailing courses on the books, and that is worth stating plainly: this is not the place for a Tackers holiday program, but it is a genuinely good place to learn race craft. Foiling windsurfers, the club's other specialty, likewise develop their skills within the fleet — the deciding round of the NSW Foil/Formula windsurfing series was sailed from here in March 2019, proof that the standard of windsurfing at Kanahooka runs to state-series level. Between the two fleets, a newcomer can pick the discipline that suits and find experienced hands happy to share what they know. In a sport where many clubs have let junior training lapse entirely, Koonawarra's honest, low-key offer — turn up, and members will teach you — has kept fresh faces coming to Kanahooka Point for decades.
Sailing waters
Kanahooka Point, in Dapto, looks out over Lake Illawarra from its western shore, about an hour and a half's drive south of Sydney; the club's radio-yacht address is 1 Kanahooka Road, Kanahooka. The lake itself is the asset: roughly ten kilometres long and five wide, it gives race officers open water roomy enough for full-size courses, with little interference from the shoreline and barely any tidal flow — rare qualities behind the club's standing claim to be an experienced championship host at state, national and even international level. The elevated site lets spectators and radio sailors alike see the whole course, and the shore is set up for serious regatta work, with large grassed preparation areas, convenient lake access, boat washing, showers and catering. The clubhouse adds another dimension. Inside is a carpeted clubroom measuring ten metres by nine, opening onto an outside balcony with views across the water to the escarpment; a well-equipped kitchen and tables and chairs for eighty people make it a natural function venue, and it is hired out for birthdays, engagements, weddings and meetings. The western-shore position has one consequence every sailor here learns to respect: exposure to the westerly. When the club hosted the NSW Foil/Formula windsurfing final in March 2019, the day delivered a westerly gusting beyond 25 knots, with 43 knots recorded at the Primbee gauge across the lake — racing was abandoned after a single race, a reminder that Lake Illawarra's flat water can turn ferocious when the escarpment wind machine switches on.
Club history
A small group of local sailing enthusiasts established the club in 1956, and in the decades since it has operated more different classes than most clubs twice its size. Small catamarans were part of the mix, and at times the club even owned cats available for members to use — the kind of practical fleet-sharing that kept sailing affordable in the suburbs west of Wollongong. A 1999 photograph of the clubhouse held in Wollongong City Libraries' local-studies collection for the suburb of Koonawarra captures the club as it was: a community fixture on the point, embedded in the life of the district. The modern reinvention came through radio yachting and foiling boards. The club hosted the RC Laser 2013 NSW State Title on Lake Illawarra at Kanahooka, establishing its credentials as a radio-sailing venue, and in March 2019 the NSW Foil/Formula windsurfing series chose Kanahooka as a fresh venue for its season decider — even if the 43-knot westerly meant only one race counted. Both milestones mattered less for the results sheets than for what they signalled: a 1950s club successfully pivoting to disciplines most of its contemporaries never embraced. Through its affiliation with the NSW Radio Yachting Association, which lists the club's sailing days and officers, Koonawarra plugs into the state radio-yacht calendar, while its regatta-hosting pitch and function-hire operation keep the clubhouse busy between race days. It is a club that has survived by adapting: when one class faded, another was welcomed in, and the result, nearly seventy years on, is a venue that serves two of sailing's newest disciplines from a site chosen when the VJ was still king.