Marine services in Sorrento

Sailing club

On a peak summer weekend at Sorrento, the moorings and starting line fill with gaff-rigged wooden boats whose working lives began chasing barracouta along the Bass Strait coast more than a century ago. The Sorrento Sailing Couta Boat Club is the custodian of that fleet — Australia's biggest Couta Boat fleet, by the club's own account — and the centre of what The Wooden Boatshop ranks among the most significant maritime heritage revivals in the country. The club sits in Australian Sailing's top affiliation tier, Category A, and its honours shelf carries Yachting Victoria's Club of the Year award from 2005 plus both the Victorian and Australian Yacht Club of the Year titles for 2015–16. The club occupies a panoramic site on the Sorrento foreshore at the southern end of the Mornington Peninsula, where calm bay water and offshore summer breezes have attracted championship regattas in numbers few Australian clubs can match — world titles in the 49er and 29er, the foiling Moth, the RS:X windsurfer and the WASZP among them. A large membership supplies the skilled volunteer workforce those events demand, while the founding emphasis on a friendly family environment and opportunities for ju