Marine services in Townsville

Sailing club

On 21 October 1895, at a meeting at Picnic Bay, a group of north Queensland sailors resolved to establish a sailing club bearing Townsville's name — a decision reported the very next day in the Brisbane Courier. That makes Townsville Sailing Club — by its own account — among the oldest clubs in the city and among the oldest sailing clubs anywhere in the state, and its long story is anything but smooth: name changes, breakaway fleets, a Depression, a lost clubhouse and more than one complete rebuild. Through it all the club has stayed loyal to one thing, stated plainly on its own pages: dinghy sailing is its specialty. The modern home is 3 Mariner Drive on The Strand, on marina land leased from the Breakwater Marina Trust since 1990, with racing out on Cleveland Bay. The club presents itself as custodian of an unusually deep competitive lineage, claiming what it calls "more than its fair share" of national and world titleholders — juniors who went on to professional campaigns, national-team coaching roles overseas and, in many cases, the Australian Maritime College. John Douglas Byrne, who began dinghy sailing here in 1969 and went on to world and national titles, Sydney-Hobarts and