Batemans Bay Sailing Club

Around seventy members, roughly six boats on the line in a typical bay race — and yet, as Vice Commodore Lachlan Brown puts it, for that number of members it's a very active club. Batemans Bay Sailing Club is the small, committed heart of sailing on the Eurobodalla coast, a volunteer outfit whose members simply love sailing on Batemans Bay and Coila Lake, in Brown's words, and who have kept racing on both, most weeks of the year, since 1974.

The club's character comes from covering two kinds of sailing at once. Keelboats race on Batemans Bay and the Clyde River, while an off-the-beach program for trailable dinghies and multihulls has run for almost fifty years, much of it now based on Coila Lake near Tuross Head. Racing and cruising sailors share the club equally, and the calendar stretches through winter with a series the club calls "Champagne sailing".

The signature event is the d'Albora Batemans Bay Marina Regatta, a two-day fixture staged annually on the weekend nearest Anzac Day. It draws competitors from interstate in off-the-beach dinghies, trailer sailers and catamarans — some chasing state and national titles — and it anchors the club's place on the regional NSW program. The social side matches the sailing: regular dinners and events, and drinks and barbecues at Coila Lake after racing. The town itself stands where the Clyde River meets the sea — a bay Captain Cook named in 1770 — on the stretch of coast Canberrans have long claimed as their own, which helps explain a membership drawn from well beyond the bay.

The distinctive engine room here is the Off The Beach program on Coila Lake. Pitched explicitly at fun, friendly competition and skill development, it uses the lake's sheltered water as a training ground for juniors, families and sailors sharpening their racing craft, and it welcomes a wide range of dinghy classes rather than prescribing a single pathway boat. The 2025/26 season runs fortnightly on Sundays from late September to April, with a season pass of just $60 — pricing that says everything about the club's grassroots intent.

Beyond the lake, development happens through an unusually varied racing menu. The keelboat program spans the Bay Cup Series around the bay, the Coastal Cup Series along the coast between Moruya and Durras, and the Toll Gate Classic within the bay. A Women's Series runs as "Sternchaser" pursuit events with the slowest boats starting first, while the River Wranglers Friday twilight series races on the Clyde River between the marina and the bridge. Category 4 and Category 7 safety standards keep the coastal and inshore racing properly audited, and the club offers AMS and SMS measuring and handicapping in-house.

The club is honest about where it wants to grow. It maintains links with Sailability so people of all abilities can get afloat, and as of 2024 was working to establish a youth sailing connection with Moruya High School. Around Australia Day, club boats also head to Jervis Bay to join Jervis Bay Sailing Club's events, giving members experience of bigger fleets and unfamiliar water. For a club of its size, the development net is cast wide.

The clubhouse and mast-up boatyard sit behind the western end of Corrigans Beach, reached via Hanging Rock Place, with mast-up storage just 200 metres from the Hanging Rock boat ramp. It is a practical, unfussy base: keelboats mostly live at the marina or on swing moorings about the bay and the Clyde River, while trailable boats come and go from the yard. The club describes the local waters as clean and uncrowded, and the bay — wide, open and framed by the Clyde River mouth — backs that up.

The off-the-beach fleet operates from Kylah Park on Coila Lake near Tuross Head, and the lake is something of a secret weapon. Almost four kilometres long by two wide, set behind low sand dunes, it offers steady land and sea breezes over flat water with no swell, current or tide to complicate matters — nearly ideal conditions for teaching, junior racing and close, tactical dinghy competition. Few clubs on the coast can offer both an open bay and a sheltered lake within a short drive of each other.

When sailors want bigger water, the Eurobodalla coast provides it. Coastal Cup racing ranges between Moruya in the south and Durras in the north, past some of the least developed shoreline in the state, and the Clyde River itself hosts the Friday twilight series between the marina and the 1956 opening-span bridge. The region's popularity with Canberrans — the so-called Capital Coast — swells the scene over summer, but the club's racing runs year-round, including a winter series the club bills as "Champagne sailing" for the crisp, steady conditions the cooler months deliver on the bay.

A small group of enthusiasts founded the club in 1974, wanting to take advantage of what they saw as the area's perfect sailing conditions. The earliest days survive mostly as fragments — all the original committee members had passed away by the time the club turned fifty — but the stories that remain are telling. A storm washed away the original clubhouse at Caseys Beach, forcing a rebuild at Hanging Rock off Corrigans Beach, where the club remains. And when rain struck a general meeting held in the still-roofless new clubhouse, members simply moved the meeting into one of their cars and carried on.

The 1990s were a high-water mark for the keelboat fleet, with 19 yachts competing in the late part of that decade. By 2024 the numbers had settled to around six boats in bay and Coila races, but the club's roughly seventy members kept the calendar remarkably full — a level of activity per member that long-serving Vice Commodore Lachlan Brown, about thirty years a member, points to with pride. The off-the-beach arm, organising racing for trailable dinghies and multihulls, has been part of the club for almost its entire life.

The fiftieth anniversary, celebrated across 25-27 October 2024, brought the threads together: a grand regatta, a birthday dinner and sailing across the club's home waters. Notable boats from the club's past, like Al Rosier's Rhubarb, were remembered alongside the modern program. Half a century on, the founding proposition hasn't changed — a small group of people who reckon the sailing here is as good as it gets, organised into a club that proves the point most weekends of the year.