Marine services in Tin Can Bay

Sailing club

The race came first; the club followed six weeks later. When the first running of the Tin Can Bay to Hervey Bay Race drew 118 yachts over the May Day long weekend of 1981, the sailors involved decided the town needed a permanent organisation, and on 28 June 1981 Tin Can Bay Yacht Club Inc was officially formed. Four decades on, the club occupies a waterfront position at Norman Point, on the tidal shores of Snapper Creek where Tin Can Inlet opens toward the southern reaches of the Great Sandy Strait — some of the most sheltered cruising water on the Queensland coast. That shelter shaped the membership from the beginning: in the club's early years, Noosa sailors who could not manage keelboats on the shallow Noosa River brought their boats north to Tin Can Bay instead. The annual Bay to Bay, as the founding race is now known, grew at extraordinary speed — 162 entries in 1982 and 204 in 1983 — and was described at the time as the second-largest event of its kind in Australia, behind only Victoria's Marley Point Lakes Race. The clubhouse itself stands on land the members helped create, reclaimed beside the Norman Point boat trailer park with fill from the marina construction next door.