IYC Sailing Incorporated

IYC Sailing Incorporated (Illawarra Yacht Club) is a not-for-profit association supporting and promoting sailing, windsurfing and radio (R.C.) yachts on Lake Illawarra. The club meets at the Illawarra Yacht Club at 1 Northcliffe Dr, Warrawong (just south of Wollongong) and runs sailing-related activities, events and member programs. The website invites new members and provides calendars, galleries and event information.

Windsurfing is the standout teaching story here. The division races from September to April, briefing at 1:15 pm on Saturdays for one or two course races, and fields the classic Windsurfer LT one-design longboard — a class enjoying a genuine revival — alongside raceboards, in typical lake breezes of five to twenty knots. Beginners are taught by appointment from eleven on Saturday mornings on club-owned boards and sails that members use free of charge, and the ages of active sailors run from twelve to eighty.

Membership of IYC Sailing carries registration through Windsurfing NSW and Australian Sailing plus limited third-party insurance. Informal Tuesday-afternoon sailing fills the daylight-saving weeks; slalom boards come out three or four windy days a season.

The radio-controlled division offers a second unusual doorway in, racing international-class RC model yachts each Wednesday and Saturday, ten till two, beside the boatsheds on the clubhouse's eastern side — newcomers can take the transmitter of a club boat before buying their own miniature masterpiece.

Conventional learn-to-sail runs through the dinghy divisions. Junior programs have long used the Sabot as the training class — a recent intake offered instruction to nine-to-fifteen-year-olds at ninety dollars a student with volunteer instructors under Club Coach Phil Bower — and in 2026 the club is adding an Adult Learn to Sail program taught on a Status 580 trailable yacht, a rare keelboat entry point for grown-up beginners.

The sailing week divides neatly: Junior and Youth Division Flying Ants and 13ft skiffs on Sunday mornings, Open Division dinghies on Sunday afternoons, and trailable yachts in their own program. The Bower Sailing Centre — once the Yachtshop building, on the clubhouse's eastern side — serves as race headquarters for the Lord Mayor's Regatta, evidence of a dedicated training and regatta base named for one of the club's sailing families.

Lake Illawarra is a shallow coastal lagoon just south of Wollongong, and the club sits on its northern shore at Warrawong with pontoons, a jetty and sea walls fronting the sailing water, launching ramps on site and further ramps available up the lake at Port Kembla Sailing Club at Berkeley. The lagoon's defining racing characteristic is its stillness in one crucial respect: the 1988 championship program noted the lake has no tidal influence, which the Commodore of the day said should make it conducive to fair competition. Courses are set purely by wind and geography, with no current handing gifts to local knowledge.

For learners, the lake's shallows are an asset. At least half the bay fronting the club comes in at waist depth, which takes much of the fear out of a first windsurfing lesson or a capsized Sabot — you can simply stand up, right the gear and start again. The windsurfing division musters on the grass by the club's western car park, where three green shipping containers stand as markers, while dinghy storage spaces are available for members. Jellyfish put in occasional appearances, as they do in most coastal lagoons.

The lake is also an environmentally sensitive waterway, and its users keep a watching brief. A 2025 proposal to run jet-ski tours from the Northcliffe Drive address drew objections centred on threatened migratory shorebirds and clashes with other lake users before an independent panel approved a hire operation at the premises despite considerable community opposition. Sailing here means sharing the lake thoughtfully — with Port Kembla Sailing Club on the northern shore, Koonawarra Bay and Oak Flats clubs around the basin, Windang's dinghy sailors, and the birdlife that made the lake worth protecting in the first place.

The club was inaugurated in 1945, when sailing enthusiasts met at Stan Dix's Lake Heights boatshed, and it was Dix who bought the club's first 16ft skiff, "Opah"; a season later six skiffs were racing alongside an open-class section. In 1949 the club bought its first land from the Wentworth Estate, and members built a forty-by-thirty-foot clubhouse with voluntary labour; the first open regatta followed on Anniversary Weekend 1951, won by a skiff skippered by H. "Pat" Collis. The social fabric of those years rested on families whose names still echo through the club record — the Wests, Dalzells, Abbotts, Masseys and Frasers.

The skiff decades made the club's name. It hosted the NSW 16ft Skiff Championship in 1972 — won by a Belmont boat skippered by Gary Bruniges — then the Inter-Dominion Championship in 1983, and in the Bicentennial summer the IMB Australian 16ft Skiff Championship ran from 31 December 1987 to 12 January 1988, opening with the Stan Dix Memorial Invitation Race. The national title went to A.S.E.A., skippered by NSW's Gavin Jones for his second consecutive championship.

A new clubhouse on the present site — foreshore swampland filled in, an effort credited to Councillor M. Jones — had been opened on 10 October 1976, and by 1988 the register showed fourteen skiffs, trailable yachts that had joined in 1982, Flying Ants, forty-plus sailboard starters and a recently introduced Skyrider training scheme.

The modern era brought consolidation. The Lord Mayor's Regatta grew from its mid-1980s beginnings to a fortieth edition in March 2025, and in 2022 the Illawarra Radio Yacht Club relocated from Dunmore to become the RC Yachts Division of IYC Sailing Incorporated. Through it all the dual structure has held: a licensed club ashore, a volunteer sailing association on the water, and a lake that has launched eighty years of Illawarra sailors.