Mordialloc Motor Yacht Club

A hundred years is a long time for any volunteer club, and Mordialloc Motor Yacht Club has just crossed that line: established in 1925 and celebrating its centenary in 2025, it is among the first clubs organised on Port Phillip's shores. Its home is one of the more unusual in Victorian boating — Lambert's Island, a grassed island in Mordialloc Creek a short walk from the Nepean Highway bridge, reached on foot over a bridge from the Bridge Hotel car park.

Despite the name, the club is a three-way proposition: sailing, fishing and power boating all have active sections, and the roughly 200 members range in age from their mid-twenties through to retirees. The sailing section races trailer-sailer and keel-type yachts on Port Phillip, with spinnaker fleets featuring on the club calendar, while the power section's navigation rallies take members to host clubs around the bay. The club pays respect to the Bunurong people of the Kulin nation, the Traditional Owners of the land and water it occupies.

Club life has a settled, convivial rhythm. General meetings run on the first Tuesday night of each month, the Sutton Lounge hosts social evenings, and members swap contributions through the Salty Yarns column and an Armchair Sailor page — the hallmarks of a club where seamanship stories are currency. The bar has even gone cash-free with a new point-of-sale system, a small sign of a centenarian club keeping current.

Members' boats still lie at creek moorings — along the South Wall, and ringing the island — as they have since the earliest days, and the creek gives sheltered access straight out into Port Phillip. It is a club for people who keep boats, use them, and enjoy the company of others who do the same.

The skills program at Mordialloc Motor Yacht Club is built around the realities of boat ownership rather than a learn-to-sail syllabus, and its most distinctive offering is slipway training. The club runs its own members' slipway, complete with cradle and winch, and because only authorised operators may run the gear, the club trains its members to use it — practical sessions covering winch operation, plus demonstrations of knots and splicing at general meetings. It is an old-school seamanship curriculum: the crafts of handling, hauling and maintaining a boat, taught member to member.

On the sailing side, the active section runs club racing for trailer-sailer and keel-type yachts, with spinnaker racing featuring in the program and a composite club calendar listing sailing events across the season. Crews looking for starts will find them here without the intensity of a big dinghy club — this is Corinthian racing for keelboat and trailer-sailer sailors who moor in the creek. The power boating and fishing section runs its own structured activity, most notably navigation rallies: the Ricketts Point Nav Rally, hosted with Beaumaris Motor Yacht Squadron, is a fixture, testing pilotage and boat-handling skills in a social format that has been part of Victorian motor yacht club culture for generations.

Prospective members should note what is not on offer. There are no Tackers courses, no formal junior learn-to-sail program, no Discover Sailing Centre accreditation and no Sailability program — families wanting children's dinghy training are better served by the neighbouring Mordialloc Sailing Club, which itself grew out of this club. What MMYC provides instead is the environment in which boat owners become better boat handlers: slipway competence, rally navigation, race experience and a clubhouse full of people who have done all of it for decades and are happy to explain how.

Lambert's Island sits in Mordialloc Creek on the boundary of Mordialloc and Aspendale, in Melbourne's City of Kingston, and the club has occupied it since 1926. The setting is genuinely uncommon: a grassed island ringed by moored boats, with a substantial clubhouse and an extensive outdoor social area, all within sight of the Nepean Highway bridge yet feeling a world apart from it. Access is by footbridge from the Bridge Hotel car park — members walk to their island clubhouse through the middle of suburbia.

Members' boats moor in the creek, berthed along the South Wall and ringing the island's edges — a practice continuous since the club's earliest years — and the creek provides sheltered access to the open water of Port Phillip just a few hundred metres downstream. For keelboat and trailer-sailer sailors, that is a handy arrangement: a protected berth, a short motor down a living waterway, and then the whole of the bay's northern sailing grounds to play on. The Mordialloc Creek entrance is a well-known local landmark, and the beaches and breaks of the bay's south-eastern shore are within easy reach for fishing crews and cruising boats alike.

The members' slipway is the facility that distinguishes the club from most of its bayside peers. Available for hire at $43 a day, it allows boats to be hauled for maintenance with a cradle and winch — an increasingly rare service on this part of the coast. Users must hold a ten-million-dollar third-party insurance certificate of currency, and only authorised operators may run the gear, which is why the club trains its own. Between the slipway, the moorings, the island clubhouse and the creek's sheltered reach to the bay, the club offers a complete small-boat owner's ecosystem — one reason its membership has held steady across a century of change on the surrounding foreshore.

The club was established in 1925, when Mordialloc Creek was the working heart of a fishing and boating village and organised yacht clubs around Port Phillip were still few. The names of the founders have not survived in the club's published record, but what they built certainly has: the original clubhouse rose on Lambert's Island in 1926, and members rebuilt it in 1956 — a structure modernised internally several times since, though its exterior remains much as the post-war members left it, with early photographs displayed inside to keep the continuity visible.

Sailing history on the island carries a significant footnote. Mordialloc Sailing Club began life within the Motor Yacht Club on Lambert's Island, before breaking away in 1946 to form its own club on the adjacent foreshore — a split that created two distinct institutions from one parent, both still operating within a few hundred metres of each other. The sailing offshoot went on to host world championships; the parent club kept its broader remit of sailing, power boating and fishing intact.

Through the decades the club has remained resolutely member-run and member-maintained. Boats have been moored along the South Wall and ringing the island since the earliest days; general meetings have kept their Tuesday-night rhythm; the bar, now cash-free, still anchors the social calendar. In 2025 the club marked its centenary, and the City of Kingston sponsored a promotional video for screening on community television — public recognition of a local institution.

One hundred years after a group of creek-side boat owners first organised themselves, the club they left behind still occupies its island, still hauls boats on its own slipway, and still gathers in a clubhouse whose walls carry photographs of the members who built it twice.