Marine services in Shelley

Sailing club

Half a century after three mates turned a chance encounter on the Canning River into an impromptu race, Shelley Sailing Club is still doing exactly what it was invented for: putting Perth families onto the water in small boats on Sunday afternoons. The club sails from the Canning River foreshore off Riverton Drive at Shelley, in Perth's southern suburbs, and it has never pretended to be grander than its 1974 origins — a club that exists, as community listings put it, specifically for family sailing. The scale today is comfortable rather than corporate: a social clubroom beside the original 1981 boat store, an air-conditioned start box fitted with a fixed anemometer, a safety boat, hire Lasers owned by the club, and a canteen whose vouchers come bundled into membership. Whole-family membership runs around $530 a year with no nomination fees — deliberately low barriers for a club whose racing classes are Lasers, Windrush 14 catamarans and Scow Moths rather than anything with a keel. Shelley appears on Australian Sailing's affiliation fee schedule as a WA affiliated club in category B, and it is listed among the stakeholders in the State Government's boating strategy for the Swan-Cann