Marine services in Booragul

Sailing club

Dinghy historians across Australia know Teralba Amateur Sailing Club by name, and it has nothing to do with size. The club's own self-description is disarmingly modest — an amateur outfit offering great lake sailing and a welcoming family atmosphere from its base at Booragul, on Lake Macquarie's northern shore, which is accurate as far as it goes — but it leaves out the club's claim to national fame. Since 2010, Teralba has been the home of the VJ class revival, the place where the Vaucluse Junior, once the most numerous dinghy in the country and by then extinct as a racing class, was brought back to life, modernised and developed into the new VJ12. That resurrection says a lot about the club's character. This is a practical, hands-on fleet of around seven home classes — Vee Ess, Vee Jay, Contender, Impulse, NS14, O'pen Skiff and Sabot, with all classes welcome — racing on Saturdays from September to Easter over a Christmas break. Now in its 77th year of operation by the club's own 2024 reckoning, it traces its first season to the late 1940s, and it has the comfortable, unhurried feel of a lake club that has watched generations of families learn on the same stretch of water. The V