Marine services in Tinaroo

Sailing club

Most Queensland sailing clubs answer to the tide; this one answers to an irrigation release. Tinaroo Sailing Club races on Lake Tinaroo, a vast freshwater storage on the Atherton Tablelands in Far North Queensland, high above the coastal sailing its state is famous for. The lake itself has a civic claim to fame — it was Queensland's first big irrigation dam, completed in 1958 and filled the following year — and sailors were afloat on it almost immediately, with two boats recorded on the water in 1960. The club followed on 10 March 1963, formed as Lake Tinaroo Sailing Club with twenty members and ten boats, and it has raced from the same shoreline ever since, at its Black Gully site. By its own cheerful assessment it is arguably the leading dinghy club in Far North Queensland, and it describes itself as a family-oriented organisation; both claims fit the evidence of a program built around junior training, school sailing and weekend racing with a barbecue in the middle. The inland setting is the defining quirk: no tides, no sharks, freshwater that is kind to hulls and fittings, and a hill-country climate that makes sailing here a different proposition from the Coral Sea clubs down th