Geelong Trailable Yacht Club

Everything about the Geelong Trailable Yacht Club starts from a single idea: the boat lives on its trailer. Rig it in the morning, launch at the ramp, race on Corio Bay, winch it back on and tow it home — no marina berth fees, no permanent mooring, no fixed overheads beyond the essentials. That philosophy, deliberately low-cost and open, has defined the club since twenty-eight people founded it in a technical school library in 1973.

Racing is based at the St Helens Marina precinct on Corio Bay's northern shore at East Geelong, with courses built from the club's own marks and buoys and the start and finish near the marina. The fleet covers trailable yachts and small ramp-launched keelboats, and the club is emphatic that you don't need to own a boat to belong: owners regularly look for crew, and visitors are welcome to sail a handful of races before being asked to join.

Alongside the racing sits an extensive cruising calendar — trailer-sailers being, after all, boats built to go places — and the club promotes a Discover Sailing pathway for newcomers. The club's voice is its newsletter Even Keel, published since 1977 and once judged the best club newsletter in Victoria. Fifty years on, celebrated with an open day and sail-past in October 2023, GTYC remains what its founders intended: a club for people who tow their sailing behind the family car, run on goodwill, a much-loved rotunda clubhouse and one of the friendlier stretches of water Port Phillip has to offer.

Most clubs teach you to sail in their boats. Geelong Trailable starts from the other end: it puts you in someone else's. The crewing pathway is the club's signature door into the sport — owners of trailable yachts regularly seek crew for racing, and the club openly invites visitors to come and try, letting newcomers sail a few races before any question of membership arises.

For people weighing up boat ownership, it is a low-risk apprenticeship: you learn sail trim, tactics and the particular arts of ramp-launched racing aboard real racing boats, and you learn them on the water rather than in a classroom. The club promotes a Discover Sailing program alongside, and its extensive cruising calendar doubles as an education of a different kind — anchoring, passage planning and coastal seamanship absorbed over weekends away with experienced trailer-sailer skippers.

Formal junior accreditation details aren't published, so families should ask directly; what the club does document is a welcoming, all-ages culture built around practical sailing. Race days themselves are the continuing education: briefings in the club rooms at St Helens, courses laid around the club's marks and buoys out on the bay, start and finish lines near the marina, and the post-race debrief where the real knowledge changes hands.

Trailer-sailer racing has its own skill set — quick rigging and de-rigging, launching and retrieval in a queue at the ramp, keeping a boat seaworthy on the road as well as the water — and this is a club where those skills are the shared currency. New members typically find the learning curve is shortened considerably by a fleet of owners only too happy to have an extra hand aboard.

Corio Bay, Port Phillip's sheltered western arm and the stretch of water Geelong stands beside, is for trailer-sailers close to ideal: flatter water than the exposed reaches of the bay, a sea breeze funnelled and steadied by the surrounding land, and enough room to set proper club courses. The club operates from the St Helens Marina area at East Geelong, a working harbour precinct that gives members what a trailer fleet actually needs — a good launch ramp, floating jetties and pontoons for the days when boats stay in the water, and firm ground for boats and trailers in between.

The shore base centres on the rotunda clubhouse at St Helens, opened in 1985 and affectionately known to members as the 'Clayton's Clubhouse'. Around it sit the practical amenities: toilets, showers, a barbecue area and club rooms used for pre-race briefings and social functions, with the Volunteer Coast Guard's facilities close at hand for added on-water confidence.

Since 1996 the club has handled minor maintenance of the rotunda itself, while the City of Greater Geelong takes responsibility for major repairs and the surrounding environs — an arrangement that keeps a volunteer club's workload proportionate. Course areas sit a short sail from the ramp, so a typical race day has boats in the water, briefed and on the start line without the long delivery legs that eat into racing time at bigger ports.

Geelong's waterfront, with its bollards and Eastern Beach enclosures, lies just around the point, and the city provides the full spread of chandleries and marine services a trailing fleet relies on. For a club without a marina of its own, St Helens supplies almost everything that matters.

The club was born on 5 September 1973 in the library at Bell Park Technical School on Barton Street, Geelong, where twenty-eight people gathered to test whether a trailable yacht group could stand alone, independent of any existing club. Alan Johnson moved the motion to form an association, Les Hayles seconded it, and it passed unanimously; a steering committee of Peter Smith as chairman, Dave Forster as secretary, Elton Wescott and Johnson himself got to work.

Three weeks later, on 22 September, Ruth Plummer of Power Drive Sails organised an open day at the Grammar School pier, and a two-dollar-per-family levy covered the first administrative costs. The new body, the Geelong Trailable Yacht Association, produced its first newsletter in October 1973 by typewriter and gestetner; Andy Petrisor, a draughtsman at Alcoa who wasn't even a member, designed the first insignia in 1974, and the first burgee — red lettering on yellow — sold for two dollars fifty.

On 31 July 1976 members voted to become a club rather than an association, and the newsletter Even Keel began publication in March 1977, going on to win best club newsletter at the Victorian Yachting Awards in 2004.

A permanent home took longer. Members met variously at the Sergeant's Mess of 10 Medium Regiment in Myers Street, the German Shepherd Dog Club's hall and later South Geelong Primary School, before the rotunda at St Helens — erected with the Shire of Corio's cooperation, the club committing up to eight thousand dollars — was opened by Councillor R. Draght on 3 November 1985. Incorporation followed, with a new constitution passed in October 1985. The club marked fifty years in October 2023, holding an open day at the St Helens boat ramp on the eighth of the month, with a season-opening address from Commodore Doug Gadd, a sail-past and afternoon tea — a long way from that gestetner machine.