Lake Keepit Sailing Club

Lake Keepit Sailing Club is a member-based sailing club on Lake Keepit (listed as West Tamworth, NSW). The club organises regular weekend racing, regattas and club events, maintains a clubhouse and promotes sailing for people of all ages. The site lists 'Learn To Sail' programs (occasionally run by club instructors), boats available for members to use, and a boat storage page for members.

The pathway into sailing at Keepit is deliberately informal, and that suits a weekend club on a country lake. The standing invitation could hardly be simpler: come along any Sunday and try sailing. Introductory courses are offered for newcomers, and once involved, members can use club boats to get out cruising on the dam — an arrangement that removes the biggest barrier facing inland sailors, the assumption that you must own a boat before you know whether the sport suits you.

School-age sailors in the district have a useful ally next door. The NSW Sport & Recreation Centre, also on the lake, runs sailing instruction for school and group bookings on the same stretch of water, so local kids frequently get their first taste of the sport within sight of the clubhouse before finding their way into the club's own activities. From there the education becomes the practical kind: learning to race in light, shifty air against sailors who have read this lake for decades. Members describe the appeal as the challenge of getting around a course that is different every time, where the skill lies in reaching the next puff before the other boat does.

Competitive development arrives through the calendar rather than the classroom. The Keepit Cup, sailed each March, welcomes anyone who fronts, whatever their home club, and the long-running interclub against New England Sailing Club for the Thunderbolt Trophy sends Keepit crews over the ranges to Malpas Dam at Armidale and brings the Armidale sailors back each autumn. The June regatta then throws the fleet against visitors from coastal clubs, giving home sailors a genuine yardstick every year.

Keepit Dam sits on the NSW north-west slopes, roughly 40 kilometres north-east of Gunnedah and 55 kilometres north-west of Tamworth, with the club found seven kilometres north of the Oxley Highway. The dam exists to store irrigation, stock and household water for the Namoi Valley, but it doubles as a serious piece of sailing water: about 34 kilometres of waterways, and at full supply, according to Tamworth region tourism material, around two-thirds the size of Sydney Harbour.

The clubhouse stands near the dam wall inside what is now the Reflections Holiday Park, formerly the Lake Keepit State Park, which wraps the club in cabins, powered camping sites, tennis courts, a BMX track and walking trails. Anglers share the water, chasing golden perch, silver perch and Murray cod, and the sailing club is one of three recreational clubs based here, beside the soaring club and the family fishing club. For the June regatta the club's leased area turns into a campsite, with log fires, hot showers and catering from Saturday dinner through to Monday lunch.

Conditions demand a particular kind of sailor. Winds are predominantly light, and racing becomes a game of anticipation — reading the lake for the next puff and reaching it first. The deeper challenge, though, is the water level itself, which is tied to the fortunes of the valley. When drought dropped the dam to one per cent capacity in 2019, the lake was simply unsailable, and in the hardest years members have made the three-hour drive in each direction to race at Malpas Dam near Armidale rather than miss a season.

The club's story begins with the dam itself. Keepit was completed in 1960, and sailing started on the new lake that same year — fittingly, Commodore Ian Pine has noted, because the engineers building the dam were sailors themselves. A group of like-minded locals soon gathered to test whether an inland sailing club could work, and in 1960 the Lake Keepit Sailing Club was founded. Within a few years of competition the members erected a clubhouse, volunteers pouring hours into a steep-roofed building near the dam wall that many visitors, the club records, consider a magnificent complement to the state park.

The Keepit Kool Regatta arrived in the late 1960s and grew into the club's signature, but drought has twice written itself into regatta folklore. In 2019, with the dam at a dire one per cent, the 51st edition shifted 200 kilometres north to Copeton Dam, where 30 hardy crews fronted from Sydney, Newcastle, Kempsey, Lake Macquarie and even Southport. Andy Sawyer's Laser Feral won the monohulls, the Nacra 20 of Brett and Lachie White took the multihulls and Daniel Beattie claimed the trailer sailers.

When drought struck again in 2023, Pine said they could simply have forgotten about it, but that the uniqueness of Keepit Dam was what members wanted to retain — so the regatta travelled once more rather than lapse.

Other silverware carries the years too. The interclub series with New England Sailing Club for the Thunderbolt Trophy has, in Pine's phrase, been "going on for donkey's years". March belongs to Keepit: the home leg is sailed on the same weekend that decides the Keepit Cup, a trophy with 45 to 50 years behind it, while the opening heat goes to the Armidale club on Malpas water as each summer gets underway. The 2024 Keepit Kool, run under Commodore Tim Corben with Race Secretary Hugh Evans, capped entries at 90 boats.