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Sailing club

More than 930 metres above sea level, in a town better known for ski racks than spinnakers, Lake Jindabyne Sailing Club runs one of the most charming sailing programs in New South Wales. "We are not a huge club," its own account concedes, "membership is approaching 150... We are however a very happy club" — and membership is rising again through the 2020s. The fleet is built mainly around Lasers, Nacras and Hobie Cats, with other classes joining in; every boat carries an Australian Sailing yardstick, and the Wednesday twilight racing is handicapped on an adjusted basis so that any sailor, in any boat, can take home the weekly Handicap Honours trophy. Turnouts of up to eighteen boats on Wednesday evenings and sixteen on Sundays are healthy numbers for a small mountain town. The season runs from November through April, neatly bookending the ski season: Wednesday twilight sails followed by a barbecue dinner, and Sunday afternoon racing. The signature event is the biennial Snowy Mountains Regatta — three races on Saturday, three on Sunday and an invitation race on Friday evening — which draws visitors from the coast and the capital. Around the sailing runs a volunteer culture that doe

Sailing club

Dinghy/Trailer sailer in Mount Isa, QLD.

Sailing club

Sailors on the coast sometimes forget that some of the keenest weekend racing in New South Wales happens hundreds of kilometres inland, on an irrigation storage in the Namoi Valley. Lake Keepit Sailing Club has run its racing on Keepit Dam, between Gunnedah and Tamworth, since 1960, and it carries the easy self-confidence of a club that knows exactly what it is: a friendly inland fleet where, as the club puts it, people from every walk of life find the companionship of like-minded sailors hard to beat. The racing itself is handicapped across an unusually broad spread of craft, from high-performance sports boats at one end of the yardstick table to cruising trailerable yachts at the other. Light-air specialists tend to thrive here, because Keepit's breezes reward patience and local knowledge rather than brute power. Visitors are welcome to turn up on any Sunday and have a go, and members enjoy standing access to club boats for cruising the dam. One fixture defines the club's year above all others: the Keepit Kool Regatta, staged every June long weekend since the late 1960s and drawing crews from across New South Wales and Queensland. Recent editions have attracted Lasers, NS15s, a

Sailing club

Dinghy/Trailer sailer in Kurwongbah, QLD.

Sailing club

On 28 November 2022, the City of Ballarat reopened Lake Learmonth to recreational boating after almost a decade of closure, and the council made a point of welcoming wind-powered vessels back onto the water. For the small yacht club that carries the lake's name, it was the end of a very long wait. Lake Learmonth Yacht Club is one of the sixteen inland Victorian clubs listed by Australian Sailing's Victorian general manager, a small dinghy club based beside the township of Learmonth, about twenty kilometres north-west of Ballarat on the Sunraysia Highway. Inland clubs like this one occupy a particular place in Australian sailing. Far from the coast and at the mercy of rainfall and water policy, they survive on loyalty rather than numbers, and their members tend to be all-rounders who race whatever floats. The documented record at Lake Learmonth fits that pattern: Explorer 16 trailer-sailers racing for a national championship, Australian Sailfish sailors photographed on the water in the mid-1970s, and Mosquito catamarans registered to the club around the turn of the century. Small classes, practical boats, and a lake that decides the terms. The club also carries civic weight beyond

Sailing club

On a lake that supports half a dozen sailing clubs, Lake Macquarie Yacht Club makes the boldest claim of any of them: it describes itself as "the oldest and largest sailing club outside metropolitan Sydney", a boast it rests on continuous operation since 1929 and the scale of its membership and fleet. Whatever the scoreboard says, the substance is hard to argue with — a member-owned, family-orientated club on absolute waterfront at Belmont Bay, running a year-round racing calendar from a clubhouse with a bar and restaurant and its own marina. This is fundamentally a keelboat club, and the racing reflects it. Competitive fleets of yachts from 30 to 50 feet sail through the year, with a non-spinnaker division keeping the door open for crews who prefer their racing without the extra sail-handling. Midweek and twilight racing sit alongside Sunday fixtures, and the program runs to a Cruising Division, the Windwarriors group and a dedicated women's sailing arm in SheSails. The club also carries an offshore tradition it is clearly proud of, crediting its members with "conquests in every major race on Australia's east coast". The membership spans keelboats and off-the-beach dinghies, and

Sailing club

Dinghy/Trailer sailer in Moogerah, QLD.

Sailing club

Very few Australian sailing clubs can claim an entire reservoir to themselves. Lake Samsonvale Water Sports Association, known to members simply as LSWSA, enjoys exactly that privilege on North Pine Dam, a drinking-water storage in the Samford Valley roughly 45 minutes from the Brisbane CBD. Because the reservoir is managed by Seqwater, the region's bulk water authority, one designated zone of the lake is set aside exclusively for association members, and neither public sailing nor motorised boating is permitted anywhere on the water. The outcome is a sheltered, uncrowded expanse of freshwater that the club promotes, on its own account, as Brisbane's nearest venue for lake sailing and water sports. Established in 1976, the same year the dam was finished, the association has spent decades shaping around 4.5 hectares of the southern bank into a grassed, tree-shaded base with a covered clubhouse deck, showers, wood-fired barbecues and direct water access off the lawn. It presents itself as a family-oriented organisation that welcomes sailboats of any class alongside kayaks, canoes and windsurfers, and its calendar blends relaxed competition days for trailer boats, skiffs and multihul

Sailing club

Dinghy/Trailer sailer in Somerset Dam, QLD.

Sailing club

Dinghy in Carcoar, NSW.

Sailing club

At midnight on a March long weekend, dozens of trailer-sailers slip off a dark Gippsland shoreline and point their bows east across Lake Wellington, bound for the far end of the lakes system. They are racing the Marlay Point Overnight Race, and the club that invented it — Lake Wellington Yacht Club — has been sending them into the night for more than half a century. The race has been called the Sydney-Hobart for smaller yachts and remains Australia's only overnight contest for trailer sailors, and it defines this club the way no single regatta defines most. The club itself stands at Marlay Point, on Lake Wellington's western shore — this being the westernmost of the Gippsland Lakes — roughly twenty kilometres out of Sale. It is a trailer-sailer and off-the-beach club whose season stretches from October to April, blending social days with racing, and whose fleet list reads like a survey of Australian family sailing: Hartley 16s, Explorer 16s, RL24s, Castle 650s, Noelex 25s, Timpenny 650s and Boomerang 20s alongside Mosquitoes, Lasers, Sabres, Hansas and assorted catamarans. Nobody needs to arrive with a boat — newcomers are invited to simply ask at the club, and something will be f

Sailing club

Mixed in Lakes Entrance, VIC.

Sailing club

A sailing club where the entire fleet was given away. That, in one line, is the story of Lakeside Sailing Club in Pakenham — a community dinghy and kayaking club whose boats arrived almost entirely through donations, grants and the generosity of local families, and whose members sail them for free. The club's stated mission is to offer a low-barrier, all-inclusive setting where anyone can learn dinghy sailing, whatever their means, ability, gender or age, and the donated fleet is that mission made physical. The club sails on the lake at the Lakeside Estate in Pakenham, in the Shire of Cardinia, roughly 56 kilometres south-east of central Melbourne, where suburbia gives way to West Gippsland. It is one of the youngest sailing clubs in Victoria, launched in 2011, and it operates as an incorporated association affiliated with Australian Sailing. Cardinia Shire's community directory describes it simply as open to all wanting to learn to sail, meeting at the Cormorant Parade boat ramp at the lake's north end. The club's character is best caught in its own framing: great camaraderie, though the competitive instinct is never far below the surface. Youngsters pick up their skills from se

Sailing club

Dinghy/Multihull in Lancelin, WA.

Sailing club

Every Saturday from September through April, as many as eighty skiffs and dinghies pour off the point at Longueville and fan out across the Lane Cove River toward the upper harbour. That weekly spectacle belongs to the Lane Cove 12ft Sailing Skiff Club, a not-for-profit community club run entirely by volunteers — sailors, families and supporters numbering close to 400 — which has occupied the same patch of foreshore beside Longueville Wharf since 1918. As the name insists, the 12ft skiff is the beating heart of the place: a two-person, high-performance racing dinghy at the centre of a fiercely contested Sydney–Brisbane–New Zealand scene that culminates each summer in the Interdominion for the Silasec Trophy. Lane Cove is one of three Sydney clubs keeping that class alive, and its sailors sit at the sharp end of it. Gladesville sailor Nick Press has steered his way to a record-equalling eight Interdominion titles as skipper — a tally later reports lifted to nine — many of them with crew Andrew Hay, and their boat Sail Inc. took the 2025 NSW Championship. Press's father Murray still races a twelve-footer for the club, and David Winning — scion of the celebrated Winning sailing famil

Sailing club

Yacht Club (mixed) in Largs Bay, SA.

Sailing club

Dinghy in Lauderdale, TAS.

Sailing club

Mixed in Launceston, TAS.

Sailing club

Yacht Club (mixed) in Ulverstone, TAS.

Sailing club

Dinghy in Lindisfarne, TAS.

Sailing club

Not every club on the Gippsland Lakes measures itself in championship pennants. Loch Sport Boat Club is a volunteer-run community boating organisation on the shore of Lake Victoria, and its charter is broader than racing: the club serves as the managing committee of the Loch Sport Safety & Water Sports Centre, champions safe boating, and exists just as much for social fellowship and marine recreation as for competition. Sailing sits inside that mix alongside powerboating, fishing and a busy events calendar that runs most of the year. The club was started by holidaymakers in January 1965, and that holiday-town character never left it. Family-based activity has been encouraged from the beginning, and the membership structure reflects it, with categories for families, singles and youth, plus a social tier that opens the door to the Boaties Bar for those who prefer their sailing from a deck chair. Membership also brings access to the club rooms and registration with Australian Sailing. Sailors who do want a start line get one. The club has hosted the Eastern Region Interclub Regatta for Victorian Gippsland clubs, and its annual Lakes Challenge draws trailable yachts onto Lake Victori

Sailing club

Dinghy in Lorne, VIC.

Sailing club

Some sailing clubs measure their history in trophies; Lourdes Hill College Sailing Club can measure its in boats built by schoolgirls. The club's first craft, a timber 125-class dinghy named ENID, was constructed in 1977 by teacher Enid Ginn and her students at a cost to the school of about $800, and the boat still rests in the club shed carrying sail number 613 on the Australian 125 National Association register. Two decades later, school sailors were back in the workshop helping builder Kenny Webber complete the fleet dinghies No Man's Land and Leeward Behaviour in August 1999, hulls 3101 and 3102 on the same register, which also records Xhiller8 and Roche Racer against the club's Hawthorne address. The club is the sailing arm of Lourdes Hill College, a Catholic independent school for girls established by the Sisters of the Good Samaritan back in 1916 and sitting on Hawthorne Road, on the bank of the Brisbane River opposite New Farm Park. The college educates girls from Years 5 to 12, with enrolment above 1,200 students; the Queensland Department of Education recorded 1,139 students across Years 7 to 12 at July 2023. Sailing holds a place among the school's representative sports

Sailing club

Mixed in Low Head, TAS.