Marine services in Walpole

Sailing club

By its own account — and no counterexample has yet been produced — Walpole Yacht Club is the only yacht club in Australia sited inside a marine park. The club stands at Coalmine Beach on the Nornalup Inlet, on Western Australia's remote south coast, surrounded by the karri, red flowering gum and peppermint forest of the Walpole-Nornalup National Park; sailors, the club reports, reckon the spot among the top ten sailing locations on the planet. That is a bold claim for a small club, but the setting argues the case unassisted: two connected inlets fed by the Frankland and Deep rivers, offering sheltered wilderness water that canoeists have long celebrated for its untouched character. The club itself is an Australian Sailing affiliated club in fee category B, serving the Walpole, Manjimup and Denmark shire communities and encouraging swimming, canoeing, fishing and power boating among individuals and families alongside the sailing itself. Its signature fixture, the In the Trees Regatta, takes over Coalmine Beach on the Labour Day long weekend each March — 149 boats across nine divisions turned up in 2018, and more than a hundred dinghies again in 2024. For a club founded in the late 1