Lysterfield Sailing Club

Melbourne has no shortage of bayside clubs, but sailing in the middle of a bushland park with kangaroos watching from the rigging lawn is a different proposition entirely. Lysterfield Sailing Club is a small off-the-beach club for dinghies and catamarans on Lysterfield Lake, a retired drinking-water reservoir in the city's outer south-east, roughly 32 kilometres from the CBD. Members describe sharing their rigging time with the local kangaroos, and that single detail captures the club's character better than any facilities list: this is sailing in the bush, on enclosed freshwater, half an hour from suburbia.

The club pitches itself as genuinely welcoming — every ability, gender, background, religion and age is explicitly invited — and it pays respect to the Wurundjeri people, the land's traditional owners. Membership is deliberately affordable: in the 2025/26 season an adult or a whole family joins for $180, and visitors can front a winter race for ten dollars a boat. Any monohull dinghy up to sixteen feet and catamarans up to 14.5 feet fit within the club's racing scope.

Racing happens weekly on Saturdays through the October-to-May summer series and every second Saturday across a June-to-September winter series, with starts at 1:30pm. The fleet mix is eclectic — Impulse, Sabre, Laser and Tasar monohulls alongside Paper Tiger, Arrow and Nacra multihulls, with RS Aeros and Moths also appearing — and members have carried the club's name to class nationals, including the Paper Tiger championship fleet. Volunteering underpins everything: members roster through Officer of the Day and safety boat duties, and racing is run from a tower overlooking the lake.

Sailability is where Lysterfield's training story starts, because few clubs of this size sustain a disability sailing program with this much commitment. Sessions run every Wednesday and Friday during the first and fourth school terms, across the sailing months from October to April, sailed in Access Dinghies — the stable, seated-sailing boats purpose-built for sailors with limited mobility. The program began at Lysterfield in the early 2000s, has its own dedicated coordinator and Facebook presence, and has become a fixture of the club's midweek life on the lake.

For beginners of standard mobility, the club operates an Australian Sailing-accredited sailing school with boats supplied — a meaningful difference from many programs, since nobody needs to own a dinghy to learn here. Introductory courses cover rigging, boat handling, core skills and safety under qualified instructors, and run in two seasonal blocks: spring (October to December) and autumn (February to March).

The structured option is Start Sailing 1 and 2, delivered across six Saturday mornings from nine to midday, priced at $290 for adults, $250 for youth aged thirteen to eighteen, and $130 for a young sailor accompanied by an adult. Graduates come away with an Australian Sailing certificate and, crucially, may use club boats for Saturday racing — so the pathway from first lesson to first start line requires no boat purchase at all.

Junior members have Tackers Optimist-class boats available to them, the unsinkable Ozi Opti style that has become the standard Australian training dinghy. From there, development is shaped by the club's compact fleet culture: young sailors step into Sabres, Lasers or Tasars alongside adults, race within a small and patient fleet on enclosed water, and learn from a duty-roster culture where everyone eventually runs the racing they once simply sailed in.

Find the club at the end of Horswood Road, Lysterfield, inside Lysterfield Lake Park, which Parks Victoria manages. The setting is unusual for a sailing club in a capital city: a reservoir ringed by natural bushland, with enough resident wildlife that members genuinely do rig beside kangaroos. The park itself adds the kind of supporting infrastructure sailing families appreciate — electric barbecues, toilets, generous parking, protected sandy-beach swimming areas, walking and mountain-bike trails, and grassed rigging areas close to the water's edge.

The lake began life as a working water supply. Lysterfield Reservoir and its aqueducts were built on Eumemmerring Creek during the 1930s and commissioned in 1936 to serve Dandenong and the Mornington Peninsula, then retired once Cardinia Reservoir came online. What water authorities left behind is a compact, enclosed sailing venue well suited to off-the-beach classes: small enough that a capsized boat is never far from help, large enough for proper club courses.

One honest caveat comes from the members themselves, who describe the lake's winds as quirky. Ringed by hills and bush, the reservoir bends and blocks the breeze, rewarding sailors who watch the water rather than the forecast and punishing those who switch off between gusts. That shifty character is precisely why regulars rate the racing as skill-building — light-air tactics and quick gear changes matter more here than boatspeed on a long bay fetch.

Race management is handled by a duty Officer of the Day working from a tower with a full view across the water, so the start line always has a clear picture of the course. For visitors, the combination of a ten-dollar winter race entry, a sandy beach launch and a bush park for the family afterwards makes Lysterfield one of the easier clubs in Melbourne to simply turn up and try.

The club owes its existence to a newspaper article and a classified advertisement. In November 1978 the Belgrave Free Press reported that the Eumemmerring Creek reservoir was surplus to water-supply needs, and canvassed suggestions for its future. George McFarlane — a Boronia local who sailed with the Warneet Motor Yacht Club and taught surveying and mathematics at RMIT — read it, placed an advertisement calling a meeting at his home, and twenty-five people turned up. The Lysterfield Sailing Club was born in that lounge room, and McFarlane is remembered as its founder.

Formal constitution followed in September 1979, when a committee was elected. The lake itself was not yet ready, so competitive racing began elsewhere — first at Warneet Yacht Club and later at Frankston Yacht Club — while the members waited for their home water to open. That patience was rewarded on 29 November 1986, when Victorian Premier John Cain officially opened the lake for public use, and the opening ceremony began with the club's own members staging a sailpast: the club that had raced in exile for seven years led the very first fleet onto its own water.

The club has sailed on Lysterfield Lake continuously since. The land's own timeline runs alongside: the catchment was transferred to the National Parks Service in 1979; then, on 19 May 1981, it was formally scheduled under the National Parks Act, securing the bushland setting that defines the sailing experience today. Club life has accumulated its own texture over the decades — long-term member Colin Fleming, for instance, built an Oughtred-designed 4.5-metre gaff-rigged sloop, Little Tern, sail number 99, and crafts replica model boats — evidence of a membership for whom boats are a lifelong craft as much as a Saturday sport.