Sailing club
Mandurah Offshore Fishing & Sailing Club
About
Mandurah Offshore Fishing & Sailing Club at a glance
Scale is the first thing to grasp about the Mandurah Offshore Fishing and Sailing Club. With a membership around the 2,500 mark, it has been described by one marine industry directory as the largest club of its kind in the country, and even its more conservative 2021 figures — 973 full boating members plus 730 associate and social members — dwarf most Australian sailing organisations. The club describes itself as the leading water-based activities club in the Peel Region, and given that its Facebook following alone tops 4,200, few would argue. The dual identity in the name is genuine. This is simultaneously a serious sailing club, with dinghy fleets from Optimists through to 29ers and keelboat racing across three divisions, and a serious fishing club whose volunteers once dropped cameras to the seafloor to help Recfishwest site the Mandurah artificial reef. Power boating gets its own organised program of competitive time trials and social events, and a club boat is available so members can get out fishing. The modern clubhouse at 115 Breakwater Parade, inside the Mandurah Ocean Marina, doubles as a functions venue capable of hosting around 400 guests across its reception spaces.
Service area: Mandurah, WA
- Club type
- Yacht Club (mixed)
- Australian Sailing
- Affiliated · 2025-26
- Primary classes
- Yacht Club (mixed)
- Kids learn to sail
- Available
About Mandurah Offshore Fishing & Sailing Club
Scale is the first thing to grasp about the Mandurah Offshore Fishing and Sailing Club. With a membership around the 2,500 mark, it has been described by one marine industry directory as the largest club of its kind in the country, and even its more conservative 2021 figures — 973 full boating members plus 730 associate and social members — dwarf most Australian sailing organisations. The club describes itself as the leading water-based activities club in the Peel Region, and given that its Facebook following alone tops 4,200, few would argue. The dual identity in the name is genuine. This is simultaneously a serious sailing club, with dinghy fleets from Optimists through to 29ers and keelboat racing across three divisions, and a serious fishing club whose volunteers once dropped cameras to the seafloor to help Recfishwest site the Mandurah artificial reef. Power boating gets its own organised program of competitive time trials and social events, and a club boat is available so members can get out fishing. The modern clubhouse at 115 Breakwater Parade, inside the Mandurah Ocean Marina, doubles as a functions venue capable of hosting around 400 guests across its reception spaces. Yet for all the size, the sporting credentials are what command attention. The club hosted the Australian Laser Open and Masters National Championships over the 2014/15 Christmas-New Year window, racing on the Indian Ocean a ten-minute reach from the marina. It co-hosts two offshore classics with Fremantle Sailing Club — the Halls Head Race down from Fremantle and the Point Robert Return — contests bound together by the Finistere Cup, struck in honour of those lost to both clubs. Big, broad and ocean-facing, this is a club that defies easy categorisation.
Training and sailing programs
Junior sailing is where Mandurah's training effort concentrates, and the club backs it with resources most volunteer organisations can only envy: a large junior section directed by a full-time professional coach. The class structure supports that ambition, with a pathway running from Optimists and Open BICs through Lasers, Pacers, RS Fevas and 29ers to Tasars, so young sailors can progress from their first hull to fast skiff-style racing without leaving the club. Regular twilight cruises round out the on-water offering for those after a gentler introduction. The club's most distinctive program, though, belongs to accessible sailing. Mandurah offers sailing opportunities for people of all abilities using specially designed accessible single and double sailboats — one of them electronically operated — opening the sport to participants whom conventional dinghies exclude. It is the kind of provision that very few Australian clubs attempt, and it sits naturally beside the junior program as evidence of a club that treats access to the water as its core business. As an Australian Sailing training centre, the club also appears in the national course finder delivering Safety Boat Operator courses, the qualification that underpins safe race management and training support everywhere. Power boaters are catered for with well-organised events, and the club boat gives members without their own vessel a route onto the water for fishing. Underpinning all of it is infrastructure that training programs elsewhere would covet: four boat-launching ramps, a 220-bay floating marina and a two-hundred-metre jetty for visiting boats. Add the keelboat divisions and their regular racing, and the pathway from a child's first Optimist lesson to ocean racing off Comet Bay can be travelled entirely within one membership.
Sailing waters
Few clubs anywhere enjoy a setting with this many options. The Mandurah Ocean Marina, home to the club, sits between the Indian Ocean on one flank and the vast Peel-Harvey Estuary system on the other, with the Harvey Estuary, Peel Inlet and the Serpentine and Murray Rivers all within reach. Offshore, the waters of Comet Bay directly off the club provide, by Australian Sailing's account, excellent sailing with reliable breezes and rolling swells — proper ocean racing terrain, as the national Laser fleet discovered when it contested the 2014/15 championships a ten-minute reach from the marina. The marina itself is a serious piece of infrastructure: a modern 220-bay floating installation with a two-hundred-metre Collector Jetty for visiting boats, four launching ramps, wash-down bays and 123 hardstand bays leasable by members. The Marina Industries Association awarded it 4.5 stars, a rating that reflects how far the facility sits beyond the average club compound. For members, the practical consequence is simple: whatever the weather and whatever the craft — dinghy, keelboat, power boat or fishing vessel — there is water to match it. The clubhouse matches the scale of the operation. Inside, members find the Marina Bar, the Sundowner Lounge and the Dolphin View Room overlooking the marina, plus an a la carte restaurant with a large outdoor alfresco area. The complex functions as a wedding and events venue with reception spaces accommodating up to roughly 400 guests, making the club a social anchor for the wider Mandurah community as well as a sporting one. Sitting at 115 Breakwater Parade on the marina's edge, with the estuary behind and the ocean in front, the club occupies one of the most complete boating addresses in Western Australia.
Club history
The modern club is a marriage, and both partners brought solid histories to it. In 2000, the Mandurah Yacht Club — established in 1969 — merged with the Mandurah Offshore Fishing Club — established in 1972 — to form the organisation that carries both pursuits in its name today. The union created something larger than the sum of its parts: a club that could cater for ocean racing sailors, estuary cruisers, power boaters and anglers under one constitution and one clubhouse roof. In August 2021 members gathered to celebrate the merged club's twentieth birthday, an occasion Australian Sailing marked with a club-in-focus feature. That note of deliberate detail runs through the club's story. Consider its role in the Mandurah artificial reef: before the structure was deployed off the coast in April 2016, club volunteers consulted with Recfishwest on its placement, even lowering cameras to the seafloor to inspect candidate sites. It was a practical, skilful contribution from a membership that knows these waters intimately — the fishing arm of the club acting on behalf of the whole recreational boating community. The sailing arm brought its own lineage. The Mandurah Yacht Club's three decades before the merger laid down the racing tradition that the combined club inherited, culminating in events such as the 2014/15 Australian Laser Open and Masters Nationals, and in the enduring offshore partnership with Fremantle Sailing Club behind the Halls Head Race and Point Robert Return. The Finistere Cup, introduced by the two clubs to honour members lost to both, gives that rivalry a solemn heart. From two modest clubs founded within three years of each other, Mandurah has built a single institution now counted — by membership at least — among the biggest boating organisations in the nation.