Nagambie Lakes Sailing Club

Beginners are the whole brief here. Nagambie Lakes Sailing Club describes itself as focused on the novice sailor, and it backs that up with a joining proposition about as gentle as Australian sailing gets: no experience required, a $50 annual social membership, and a sailing fee of just $5 per private boat per sailing day. It is a community-based, volunteer club, re-formed only in 2022, and it runs on friendliness rather than fleet lists.

The scale is honestly modest. The club owns a single sailing boat, which needs an experienced skipper aboard, and as of 2025 it does not offer public sail rides. What it offers instead is a low-pressure doorway into the sport on one of Victoria's great inland stretches of water, Lake Nagambie, from a boatshed at the Nagambie Lakes Regatta Centre on Loddings Lane. Kayakers and stand-up paddleboarders are welcomed as members alongside the sailors, widening the club's reach across anyone who likes being afloat under their own steam.

Bev Guest-Smith, who steered the re-formation as president and commodore and by 2025 carried the president, secretary and public officer roles, personifies the volunteer energy holding it together. The club sits inside a supportive web of local institutions — Nagambie Lakes Community House, Strathbogie Shire, the Bendigo Bank — and keeps close ties with neighbouring clubs at Waranga and Shepparton. In earlier seasons children aged seven to seventeen joined free alongside a parent member, which reinforced the family-first pitch. For a Goulburn Valley local wondering whether sailing might be for them, this is the softest possible first step.

The most distinctive thing about the club's offering is its shape: there is no formal course ladder to climb, because the club is deliberately built around informal, supported sailing. Sunday is the engine room. Every Sunday from 10 am through the October-to-April season, members gather at the lakeside boatshed to rig boats, sail socially, then share a BYO barbecue lunch at noon. Training sessions are folded into the rhythm rather than fenced off from it — a three-hour morning instruction block might run on a club sailing day, led by a qualified Australian Sailing instructor under the national body's safety, training and insurance framework, to which both club and instructor are affiliated.

The kayaking arm runs parallel: a group meets at 9 am on Wednesdays (Fridays have featured in some seasons), club kayaks are available to borrow, and a WhatsApp group keeps everyone coordinated. It is an effective recruiting net — plenty of paddlers drift across to sailing once they are comfortable on the water.

Partnership fills the gaps a small club cannot cover alone. Members get invitations to sail free at Waranga Boat Club mid-week, and Nagambie works closely with both Waranga and Shepparton sailing clubs, giving members access to bigger fleets and deeper experience pools. An annual published Safety Plan underpins all of it, and occasional Friday-night dinners at the Nagambie Rowing Club Bistro — complete with meat-raffle fundraisers — hold the social side together. Racing fleets and a Tackers program are ambitions for the future rather than current realities, and the club says so openly.

Lake Nagambie is the kind of sailing water most clubs can only dream about. A broad freshwater reach of the Goulburn River in Victoria's Hume country, it was created when the Goulburn Weir went in back in 1890, and its level stays fairly constant — no tide tables, no shoaling bars, just flat, sheltered fresh water ringed by river red gums. The Strathbogie Shire manages the waterway between Hughes Creek and the weir, including the lake itself.

The club's home is a sailing boatshed at the Nagambie Lakes Regatta Centre on Loddings Lane — a venue rowers and paddlers rate highly, one that hosts state and national championships in rowing and canoeing, plus the schools' Head of the River, an event with roots stretching to 1868. Sailing shares that pedigree stretch of water, launching near the public ramp at McNamaras Point, with a second ramp opposite the centre. The lake's long, straight reaches were made for rowing course racing, but they suit small-boat sailing just as well: room to stretch, clean wind off the banks, and none of the chop that plagues bigger open reservoirs.

Inland conditions do impose their own rules. Summer heat in the Goulburn Valley can be fierce — the club cancelled sailing on 5 January 2025 during a heatwave — and winter stillness shortens the practical season to the October-to-April window. Winds are typically lighter and shifter than on the coast, which suits the club's teaching focus: gentle breezes, forgiving water and no swell make Lake Nagambie a patient classroom. The annual Nagambie open-water swim even starts from the sailing club's patch of shoreline.

Sailing at Nagambie goes back further than the current club's name suggests. The first sailing club on the lake was established in 1933, and, as local accounts put it, "many versions" of a sailing club have existed on the lake across the decades since. The present incarnation, Nagambie Lakes Sailing Club Inc., dates from 2022, when a steering committee of Olga Novak, Bev Guest-Smith, Bernadette and Geoff Boadle, and Jeannette and Ross Murray gathered under the wing of the Nagambie Lakes Community House to bring organised sailing back.

Rebuilding was a genuinely community-wide effort. A community grant from Strathbogie Shire rebuilt the sailing boatshed clubhouse at the Regatta Centre, Nagambie Outdoors Store put up equipment sponsorship, GoNagambie handled administrative support, the Bendigo Bank stumped up funding for facilities, and the Mechanics Institute chipped in life jackets. The club's public debut came at the Nagambie On Water (NOW) Festival on Saturday 25 February 2023, when qualified instruction backed come-and-try sailboat rides for festival-goers.

Since then the milestones have been steady and practical: affiliation with Australian Sailing, a first AGM at the boatshed on 17 November 2024, a second on 23 November 2025, and a membership model re-cut for 2025-26 around the $50 social fee plus per-day sailing charges. The club now counts a recognisable list of local backers, from the shire to the local pharmacy. Barely a few years into its new life, it has already restored something the lake had lost — a standing club where a complete novice can show up on a Sunday morning, borrow a life jacket and learn to sail on water that has hosted boats for well over a century.