Marine services in Warrawong

Sailing club

Sailing on Lake Illawarra has run through one address for eight decades: 1 Northcliffe Drive, Warrawong, home of the Illawarra Yacht Club and of IYC Sailing Incorporated, the not-for-profit association that runs the sport from the licensed club's foreshore premises. The arrangement is distinctive — a community licensed club with its bistro, function rooms and auditorium providing the roof, while IYC Sailing independently organises the dinghies, trailable yachts, windsurfers and radio-controlled yachts on the water. The club's history reaches back to 1945, and by the Shellharbour historian's reckoning it stands as the Illawarra's oldest sailing club, started four years before neighbouring Oak Flats Sailing Club. This was one of New South Wales's great 16ft skiff strongholds. The club hosted the state championship in 1972, the Inter-Dominion in 1983 and the Australian championship across the Bicentennial summer of 1987–88, and by 1988 it had fourteen skiffs on register alongside trailable yachts, Flying Ants and a sailboard section drawing more than forty starters a race. That multi-discipline character survives: trailable yachts have raced here since 1982 and remain a strong divisi