Marine services in Copeton (near Inverell)

Sailing club

At 1,175 metres above sea level on the NSW Northern Tablelands, New England Sailing Club sails higher than anyone else in the country — at least according to the club itself, which styles its Loch Malpas home the "Highest Sailing Club in Australia". The altitude is more than a slogan. This is a small regional club where sailors pull on wetsuits to race in September, where the season calendar bends around a cold, elevated water supply dam, and where the fleet leans towards off-the-beach cats and dinghies alongside the newer wing foil and windsurfing craft rather than keelboats. The club describes its own atmosphere as fun and friendly, open to sailors of all levels, and it also answers to a second name — the New England Sailing and Aquatic Club — reflecting the mixed water-sport community that shares the dam. What lifts this modest outfit well beyond its weight is a genuine high-performance thread. The club's current Commodore is Andrew Landenberger, Olympic silver medallist in the Tornado catamaran class at Atlanta 1996, who lives nearby at Ben Lomond and sails regularly at Malpas. The club claims, in its own words, to be home to "multi-year olympic, world, national and state cham