Brisbane Valley Sailing Club

Brisbane Valley Sailing Club is a small, community sailing club based on the northern shores of Wivenhoe Dam (Lake Wivenhoe) in Queensland. The club runs racing for off-the-beach single- and multi-hull boats, holds club events at Hayes Landing, and organises an annual Winter Marathon (open-invitation event held at Logan’s Inlet). The club describes a long history (40+ years) and a small membership (around 10–15 members).

Honesty first: Brisbane Valley runs no learn-to-sail program, no Tackers courses and no Discover Sailing operation, and its website offers no training pathway at all. With a membership of ten to fifteen experienced hands, the club's energy flows entirely into racing — newcomers wanting instruction should look to the larger training clubs around Brisbane, while sailors who can already handle a boat will find a warm welcome and a start line here.

The year's unquestioned centrepiece is the Winter Marathon, an open off-the-beach fixture sailed over the first weekend of June from Logan's Inlet. Up to a hundred boats typically make the trip — an organisational feat for a committee small enough to seat at one picnic table — drawn by long-format lake racing and the inlet's modern camping ground. Around that anchor, the club conducts a season of regular races from Hayes Landing open to any trailerable dinghy or multihull, governed by a published calendar and formal sailing instructions; the 2025–26 season documentation is already current, a level of administrative diligence many larger clubs would envy.

The fleet is eclectic by design: dinghies and cats of varied pedigree, with Weta trimarans featuring strongly in recent club imagery. No formal class list is published, because the entry rule is effectively "if it fits on a trailer, bring it". That openness, sustained for nearly five decades, is the club's real program. Visitors towing a boat to the marathon need nothing more than the published sailing instructions and a camping booking; the welcome, by all accounts, does the rest.

Lake Wivenhoe exists because of catastrophe: it is Brisbane's principal water storage, created when Wivenhoe Dam was constructed in the wake of the disastrous 1974 flood. The club makes its home along the lake's northern shoreline, conducting regular racing from Hayes Landing in the Billies Bay and Hayes Inlet area — water the club had to wait the better part of a decade to reach, sailing there only from 1987.

The setting is classic Australian lake country: wide reaches of open water wrapped in bushland, remote enough to feel like an escape yet close enough to Brisbane for a day trip. Shore facilities are shared with the public. In 2016 Seqwater threw Hays Landing and Billy's Bay back open to general visitors and upgraded the recreation reserve, so club sailors now rig in a well-maintained public space rather than behind the members-only arrangements of earlier times.

Come June, the scene shifts west to Logan's Inlet, where up-to-date camping lets marathon visitors turn the event into a full weekend. The club publishes no wind or weather data specific to its courses, but a large storage lake ringed by hills offers dependable room for off-the-beach racing without coastal swell, tidal currents or shipping traffic to dodge. The club's first home was much smaller water altogether — Atkinson's Dam, where racing began in September 1978 and continued until the Wivenhoe move.

Between the two impoundments, the club has spent close to half a century sailing the very storages that keep South East Queensland supplied.

It began, the club's own account records, with two men sitting on a bank. In the early months of 1978 Fred Weber and Barry Neden were talking sailing beside Atkinson's Dam when the idea of a club took hold. They placed a notice in the Queensland Times calling interested sailors together; a steering committee emerged from the first gathering, and at the second general meeting Barry Neden took the helm as inaugural Commodore, with Barry Kilmister of Gatton as first Secretary.

Racing commenced that September on Atkinson's Dam, the fleet comprising mostly dinghies with a handful of catamarans. Ambition reached further almost immediately: during that first year the club approached the Co-ordinator General's Department — the state authority then building Wivenhoe Dam — seeking a sailing site on the future lake. Permission to use the Billies Bay and Hayes Inlet area arrived in the early 1980s, yet sailing there only began in 1987, and initially on a members-only footing, with fishermen and other lake users admitted as associate members.

Corporate structure followed in 2006, when the body incorporated as Brisbane Valley Sailing Club Inc. A decade later the balance with the public shifted again: Seqwater's 2016 re-opening of Hays Landing and Billy's Bay, with upgraded facilities, ended the exclusive-access era while delivering the best shore infrastructure the club has enjoyed. Through every chapter the Winter Marathon has grown in stature — a hundred-boat open event delivered annually by one of the smallest memberships in Queensland sailing, and a quietly remarkable organisational achievement.