Shelley Sailing Club

Club overview

• Shelley Sailing Club formed from informal small-boat racing in 1974 and remains a community-focused dinghy club located on the Canning River foreshore off Riverton Drive at Shelley in Perth's southern suburbs.

Facilities and club life

• The club operates a modest, volunteer-run facility: an original 1981 boatshed that serves as the boat store, adjoining social clubrooms, an air-conditioned start box on the boatshed roof with a fixed anemometer, a safety boat and a canteen. Club-owned Lasers are available for hire to newcomers.

Racing and calendar

• Shelley concentrates on short-course, off-the-beach dinghy racing and social sailing, with a formal season (October–March) that includes an Open Series and signature events such as the Convict Bay Regatta and the locally traditional Cock of the Canning race.

Community and access

• The club emphasises family participation and low barriers to entry: whole-family membership and a discover-sailing culture that invites new sailors to try a Sunday afternoon session without owning a boat.

The pathway into Shelley starts young and stays relaxed. The club's junior development program takes children from age eight, teaching them in Minnow and Mudlark dinghies on Sunday mornings — a low-pressure introduction that matches the family brief perfectly. From there the ladder continues through learn-to-sail classes offered across multiple boat types, plus formal courses and race coaching delivered under the club's Australian Sailing affiliation.

Adults are anything but an afterthought: the club openly invites newcomers to come and try sailing on any Sunday from about one o'clock between October and April, and with club Lasers for hire a beginner can get afloat without owning a thing. The racing classes tell their own story about who sails here. The Laser fleet, the club notes, is crewed single-handed by men and women from fifteen years of age to past sixty, with Radial and Standard rigs suiting different body weights.

The Windrush 14 is a Perth-built fourteen-foot off-the-beach catamaran and a winner of an Australian Design Award, able to be rigged cat or sloop and handled solo. The Scow Moth completes a trio that keeps costs modest and racing close. The competitive calendar runs through an Open Series from October to March with two o'clock starts, anchored by two fixtures of genuine local folklore: the Convict Bay Regatta, which celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2025, and the race bearing the frankly irresistible name Cock of the Canning.

Under the 2024-25 committee — Commodore Riko Stevens, Secretary Chris Musto and Treasurer Andrew Currie — the whole program keeps humming along.

Everything about Shelley's home water argues for the club's chosen style. The Canning River at Shelley offers the quiet, protected water of a broad suburban river — no ocean swell, a world away from exposed coastal chop — just steady reaches of open river in Perth's southern suburbs. That kind of water has practical virtues a family club exploits fully: a capsize is an inconvenience rather than an emergency, young sailors can be turned loose in Minnows within sight of the clubhouse, and race officials in the air-conditioned start box can read the breeze off the club's fixed anemometer before the first warning signal.

The club's footprint sits off Riverton Drive, with the social clubroom and boat store beside the launching area, while mail goes to a Parkwood post office box. This is also carefully managed water: Shelley Sailing Club appears among the stakeholders in the State Government's boating strategy covering the Swan-Canning riverpark, sharing the river system with paddlers, rowers and power craft under a coordinated plan. Nor does the club sail in class isolation.

Its classes pages map a network of sister clubs racing the same boats around the state — Maylands, Geographe Bay, Koombana Bay and Princess Royal for Lasers; for the Windrush, clubs at Walpole, Denmark, Jervoise Bay and Augusta — so a Shelley sailor who travels to a country regatta finds familiar competition waiting on the start line. It is the classic river-club bargain, struck with unusual success: modest water, used brilliantly, across fifty seasons and counting.

Shelley has preserved its foundation story in unusual detail, and it begins with a challenge. In 1974 Dr Malcolm Hoare, Tony Quayle and David Hartley happened to be sailing small craft near the Shelley ends of Beryl and Modillion Avenues when a challenge to race was issued. The impromptu contests became a habit; Roy Whitehead joined after buying a Mirror dinghy, Russell Matthews followed, and on 23 March 1975 the group held its first General Meeting, electing Tony Quayle President, Roy Whitehead Vice President, Simon Dodd Secretary and Max Birch Treasurer.

Growth came immediately. The first AGM, on 21 August 1975, opened a season in which 74 boats were registered and thirty to forty of them regularly fronted for Sunday afternoon sailing; affiliation with the Yachting Association of WA followed six days later, on 27 August. Bricks and mortar took longer. Incorporation was instigated in 1979, and in June 1980 the club negotiated a licence with the City of Canning for its present site.

Members built the original boatshed during the 1981 off-season — it survives as the clubhouse boat store — and Hon Clive Griffiths MLC performed the opening on 18 October 1981; a start box was later formed atop its concrete roof. The extended clubrooms arrived next, financed by a $30,000 City of Canning loan against the $10,283 members had raised by March 1994; Mayor Dr Mick Lekias declared them open on 9 October that year.

Three decades on, the club celebrated fifty years on the Canning in 2025, centring the occasion on a golden-anniversary Convict Bay Regatta — the same fixture that has anchored its calendar for as long as most members can remember.