Marine services in Wollongong

Sailing club

Sailing Club in Wollongong, NSW.

Sailing club

The Illawarra's keelboat sailors have exactly one home port, and it's Wollongong Yacht Club. Operating out of Belmore Basin — the working harbour beneath Wollongong's little lighthouse, which the club regards, by its own account, as the finest position on the harbour — this is the region's dedicated offshore and cruiser-racer club, sailing year-round along a stretch of coastline that runs from Port Hacking in the north to Kiama in the south. Fortnightly racing mixes local offshore courses with genuine ocean passages, and summer brings twilight sailing on weekday evenings. The club's personality was set by its unusual origins: for its first decades it owned no clubhouse at all, meeting in car parks, members' lounge rooms and a succession of borrowed halls. What held it together was the water and the people. Even today, with a clubhouse finally taking shape through member labour and small government grants, the after-race institution is the "yachties cafe", where crews gather once the boats are packed away. The membership — 103 as of 2020, up from around 40 five years earlier, with women making up 30 per cent plus student and junior members — describes the place as small enough that