Lake Cootharaba Sailing Club

Lake Cootharaba Sailing Club is a member-run sailing club on Lake Cootharaba at Boreen Point, QLD. The club organises regular club racing, major regattas (including state and national championships and the Allboats Regatta), junior regattas and development programs, and offers learn-to-sail and other training courses. The club webpage lists contact phone numbers and notes the clubhouse is open on Sundays (weather permitting) and during regattas, with a Friday-night bar during the season.

The club is an accredited Discover Sailing Centre, and what distinguishes its offering is how deliberately everything is priced and packaged for families. Tackers courses for children run as 20-hour programs at a listed $320, with $50 Tackers Intro sessions for the curious — the national junior pathway, delivered with unusual cost transparency. Teenagers and adults from age twelve learn in Vagabond dinghies through Start Sailing 1 and 2, charged at $200 per 12-hour course.

Free Discover Sailing Days offer 30-to-45-minute try-sailing sessions for anyone aged five and up, Queensland Play On! Sports Vouchers are accepted, and the club honours the Duke of Edinburgh's International Award — small details that together lower every common barrier to entry. Junior members are trained by club coaches, and the club's 50th-anniversary history identifies junior training as a driver of membership growth; the club first became an official training centre back in 1981, launching junior sailing schools that have run in various forms ever since.

Racing underpins the instructional side. Club racing runs most Sundays through a season commencing in September, with classes spanning trailer sailers, catamarans and monohulls. The annual regatta slate — Allboats, the Cat Challenge, MonoMasters, the Easter Regatta and a Junior Allboats — gives graduates immediate goals to aim at, and recent national hosting includes the 45th Windsurfer Class Australian Championships in January 2023 plus the Open Skiff Nationals and Arrow Nationals over the 2023–24 summer. For a volunteer-run club at the end of a hinterland road, the breadth of the calendar is remarkable.

Lake Cootharaba is, by the club's and local sources' accounts, Queensland's largest coastal lake — roughly ten kilometres by five — a shallow tidal lake within the Noosa River system that drains the interior swamps through the river to the sea. Average depth is only about four feet, which keeps the water flat and warm and makes capsizes forgiving for training fleets, while the club credits the predominant sea breezes with delivering flat-water sailing conditions it rates among the finest on earth — a bold claim, but the club's own, and one its championship-hosting record does nothing to undermine. Water-skiing is prohibited on the lake, leaving the surface largely to sailors, paddlers and anglers.

The club occupies 24 Boreen Parade in Boreen Point village, on the lake's western shore, with a clubhouse, boat storage facilities and the Black Flag Bar, which opens most Friday nights from five. The village itself is small and characterful: a council campground, a general store and the historic Apollonian Hotel serve the sailing and holiday traffic.

Boreen Point sits within the Noosa Shire on the Sunshine Coast, and the journey there has always been part of the club's story: early members travelled for more than an hour over dirt roads — sometimes flooded — from farms as far afield as Kin Kin, just to get a sail. Modern access is considerably easier, but the lake has not changed: wide, shallow, breezy and uncrowded, it remains the kind of water where junior fleets, veteran windsurfers and trailer sailers can share a Sunday without friction.

The club's own 50th-anniversary history, written by Jean Duffield in January 1996, opens with Patron and Life Member Fred Bunney's recollection that it all started with one boat in 1945. The formal beginning came at eight o'clock on the evening of 12 February 1946, when thirteen named attendees plus sponsor M. Harris held the inaugural meeting. They named the club Lake Cootharaba Sailing Club, chose club colours and a triangular pennant, and moved to purchase allotment 15 of the Boreen Estate and erect a 24-by-20-foot shed.

First office bearers were HR Cooper as president, HD Wood as secretary-treasurer and F Bunney as vice president, with fees fixed at £1.10 a year — the same sum the club paid for the use of Merv Bunney's boat as its first official craft.

The early club concentrated on the 12-foot Trainee class, ran its first Easter Carnival in 1946, and in May that year affiliated with the National Fitness Committee and the Trainee Association of Queensland, appointing F.A. O'Connor as first Patron. After a hiatus, sailing resumed in 1951 with an annual general meeting at Boreen Point on 28 October, which returned F. Bunney as president and installed K.H. Lawrence as secretary-treasurer. Between 1951 and 1955 the club adopted a constitution, completed the boatshed and launched its first rescue boat, sold in 1958.

Construction of the present clubhouse began in 1960, with members performing most of the labour themselves; the original shed was sold off and taken away in 1961, the year the Ladies Committee formed. A major flood inundated the clubhouse in January 1968; the 1970s brought an aluminium rescue boat called The Doc, the club's first National Title event, a fresh constitution, plus new Poop Deck, canteen and bar additions. Official training-centre status arrived in 1981, incorporation in 1983, and after another major flood in 1992 the canteen was upgraded and registered as a café. The club owns its property outright — a fitting end point for a story that began with a single borrowed boat.