Marine services in West End

Sailing club

Few sailing clubs anywhere in Australia sit as close to a capital city's centre as South Brisbane Sailing Club. Its weatherboard clubhouse stands beside Orleigh Park in West End, on a bend of the Brisbane River barely three kilometres upstream from the CBD, and the distance from the back of the building to the water's edge is less than 16 feet. The club traces its beginnings to 1903, which by its own reckoning makes it Queensland's third-oldest sailing club, and it has spent more than a century as a family-based dinghy club racing on the same river reaches. The current membership sits at just over 100, a figure that stabilised after a dip following the 2011 flood, and the club points with some satisfaction to its composition: around 45 per cent female participation and roughly a quarter juniors and youth. The sailing calendar follows the rhythm of an earlier era, with training on Saturday mornings and races on Saturday afternoons from early September through to the end of March, and the front lawn still hosts sausage-sizzle picnics overlooking the river, a tradition the club dates to the early 1900s. Inside, the upper walls carry a dense collage of photographs, medallions, records