About
Tinaroo Sailing Club at a glance
Most Queensland sailing clubs answer to the tide; this one answers to an irrigation release. Tinaroo Sailing Club races on Lake Tinaroo, a vast freshwater storage on the Atherton Tablelands in Far North Queensland, high above the coastal sailing its state is famous for. The lake itself has a civic claim to fame — it was Queensland's first big irrigation dam, completed in 1958 and filled the following year — and sailors were afloat on it almost immediately, with two boats recorded on the water in 1960. The club followed on 10 March 1963, formed as Lake Tinaroo Sailing Club with twenty members and ten boats, and it has raced from the same shoreline ever since, at its Black Gully site. By its own cheerful assessment it is arguably the leading dinghy club in Far North Queensland, and it describes itself as a family-oriented organisation; both claims fit the evidence of a program built around junior training, school sailing and weekend racing with a barbecue in the middle. The inland setting is the defining quirk: no tides, no sharks, freshwater that is kind to hulls and fittings, and a hill-country climate that makes sailing here a different proposition from the Coral Sea clubs down th
Service area: Tinaroo, QLD
- Club type
- Dinghy
- Australian Sailing
- Affiliated · 2025-26
- Primary classes
- Dinghy
- Kids learn to sail
- Available
About Tinaroo Sailing Club
Most Queensland sailing clubs answer to the tide; this one answers to an irrigation release. Tinaroo Sailing Club races on Lake Tinaroo, a vast freshwater storage on the Atherton Tablelands in Far North Queensland, high above the coastal sailing its state is famous for. The lake itself has a civic claim to fame — it was Queensland's first big irrigation dam, completed in 1958 and filled the following year — and sailors were afloat on it almost immediately, with two boats recorded on the water in 1960. The club followed on 10 March 1963, formed as Lake Tinaroo Sailing Club with twenty members and ten boats, and it has raced from the same shoreline ever since, at its Black Gully site. By its own cheerful assessment it is arguably the leading dinghy club in Far North Queensland, and it describes itself as a family-oriented organisation; both claims fit the evidence of a program built around junior training, school sailing and weekend racing with a barbecue in the middle. The inland setting is the defining quirk: no tides, no sharks, freshwater that is kind to hulls and fittings, and a hill-country climate that makes sailing here a different proposition from the Coral Sea clubs down the range. Membership has grown from that first score of sailors to around two hundred at the club's fiftieth anniversary in 2013, when more than fifty boats were on the register. The club posts to Kairi, a tiny Tablelands locality, maintains a website, a Facebook page and a YouTube channel, and welcomes newcomers to a shoreline its founders picked out with a surveyor's eye in 1963.
Training and sailing programs
Formal learn-to-sail provision is a point of difference here: the club operates as an accredited Australian Sailing Discover Sailing Centre, its courses delivered by qualified instructors along the national Start Sailing pathway. Start Sailing 1 and Start Sailing 2 are open to adults as well as children from nine years up, with the entry course priced at $165 including GST — unusually transparent pricing that signals eagerness to recruit. Training is woven into the racing rhythm rather than separated from it. On race days, morning coaching sessions cater for kids from eight years and for adults, taking everyone from raw beginners to experienced hands; a barbecue lunch follows, and then comes the serious business of usually two afternoon races. Racing itself runs on alternate Sundays for most of the year, pausing for school holidays. A high school team sailing program occupies Friday afternoons in Terms 1 and 4, requires no prior experience, and finishes with a sausage sizzle — a recruitment funnel disguised as an afternoon snack. The boats tell the story of a club balanced between junior development and senior racing. O'pen Skiffs carry the juniors, while Lasers, Tasars and a spread of catamarans make up the senior fleets most commonly seen. The training fleet is correspondingly mixed: RS Fevas and RS Quests for group instruction, O'pen Skiffs and Lasers for individual progression, and a Nacra 5.0 for the catamaran inclined. Events draw campers to the shoreline, with the club taking camping registrations for its bigger weekends. It adds up to a coherent ladder — from a first Start Sailing course to a state title — run entirely on a Tablelands dam, and the club's honour roll of national and world champions suggests the ladder works.
Sailing waters
Lake Tinaroo spreads across the Atherton Tablelands west of Cairns, a large irrigation storage filled in 1959 whose arms reach back into rainforest country — an unusual backdrop for Australian dinghy racing, which so often happens within sight of surf. The club's home is Black Gully, on a shore described on its own website as an absolute waterfront location, positioned, the club records say, three chains to the west of the old Danbulla Road. That site was chosen with care. Within days of forming in 1963, the club sought land from the irrigation authorities, and the requirements its founders recorded say everything about their intentions: four to five chains — roughly ninety metres — of water frontage sheltered from the south-east, a firm bottom, road access for trailed boats, and a good view across the dam so the clubhouse could watch the racing and double as the start-finish line. The land was officially allocated by early 1964. The sailing water itself behaves nothing like the coast. There are no tides to calculate, no swell and no salt to corrode fittings; breezes arrive shaped by the Tablelands terrain, and the dam's levels rise and fall with the irrigation season rather than the moon. For visiting sailors accustomed to tidal ramps and sandbars, the lake offers the novelty of simply rigging and launching. The club leans into the bush setting by offering camping registration for its events, turning regatta weekends into lakeside stays. Mail reaches the club at PO Box 5, Kairi — a Tablelands address that underlines how far this club sits, in every sense, from the seaboard norm of Queensland sailing.
Club history
The lake came first. Queensland's first big irrigation dam was finished in 1958 and filled a year later, and by 1960 two sailing boats were already exploring it. On 10 March 1963 twenty enthusiasts with ten boats between them formed Lake Tinaroo Sailing Club, electing as first president Mike Stephens, a former British Merchant Service sailor, with local accountant Les Moody as Secretary-Treasurer. Nine days later the infant club wrote to Mareeba's Irrigation and Water Supply Commission seeking ground on which to launch and rig boats and, in time, site a clubhouse. The Black Gully site was allocated by early 1964; membership already stood at 69, with twenty boats. By 1967 there were 132 members and 36 boats, and that year's May Day Regatta drew forty to fifty visiting boats. The first club champions, in 1965-66, were Les Moody (Lightweight Sharpie), J. Whebel (Sabot) and Eric Kennedy (Gwen 12). Class fashions charted the decades: Lightweight Sharpies stayed the senior boat of choice into the 1990s, Gwen 12s filled the main intermediate role until roughly 1983, and windsurfers and open sailboards raced for four years in the late 1980s. Wider sailing history surfaces unexpectedly here: Moody's Sharpie Daring had previously belonged to John Cuneo, who went on to Olympic Dragon-class gold, and international OK Dinghy sailors in town for the 1965 Green Island Classic at Cairns signed the clubhouse rafters — autographs still legible four decades on. The fiftieth year, 2013, brought some 200 members, over 50 boats and a written history drafted by stalwart Joe Miller and edited by Petrea McCarthy. The honour roll is remarkable for an inland club: the MacGregor family alone accounts for Access 2.3 world titles to Duncan (2007) and Angus (2010, 2012) — Angus adding Yachting Australia's Sailor of the Year with a Disability award in 2010 — plus a Skud 18 national crown, a string of Tasar state championships and an O'pen Bic national title to Aidan; Kristen Wadley added junior world titles in 2012 and 2013.