South Gippsland Yacht Club

Inverloch can fairly claim a place in world sailing history: the Moth class — the little scow that went on to circle the globe and eventually sprout foils — was born on Anderson Inlet in 1928. The South Gippsland Yacht Club sails that same water today, and it does so in a deliberately modest key. Southern Wooden Boat Sailing has called it an "archetypal community organisation", enthusiastically run by and for the locals, and the club's foreshore buildings have what the same observer affectionately termed a functional beach shack quality. Australian Sailing lists it as a Category B club.

The club's own stated priority is participation — fun for every member regardless of skill level or the class of boat they sail — and the fleet reflects that: Impulses, Lasers, RS Aeros and Sabres in the monohull divisions, Taipans and Mosquitos among the cats, all launched off the beach into a shallow tidal inlet that keeps keelboats out and the focus firmly on small boats. The season runs from November, with Sunday racing between eleven and two and regattas programmed on every public holiday weekend.

The event that has put the club on the national map is the Inverloch Classic Wooden Dinghy Regatta, which began around 2015 and which Southern Wooden Boat Sailing describes as the country's largest gathering of classic wooden dinghies. One honest caveat belongs in any account of this club: when the present organisation was founded is not stated in its own publications, a distinction explored in the History section. What the club may lack in documented pedigree it more than replaces with the pedigree of its water.

The entry point here is the club sailing school's Introduction to Off the Beach Sailing course — an intensive twelve hours spread over two days in the school holidays, priced around $250, mixing onshore demonstrations and theory with one-on-one coaching on the water. That concentrated format suits a holiday town: families can time a course to an Inverloch summer stay and come away genuinely started in the sport. It is equally important to state what the club does not offer.

Its courses page notes there is no official year-round training program and that Tackers is not currently available at SGYC, and no Discover Sailing Centre accreditation appears in published listings — even as the club's own homepage speaks of comprehensive programs for juniors and seniors alike, with professional coaching on offer. Prospective families should ask the club directly about the current season's arrangements.

What removes the financial sting is the club boat fleet, available free to sailing members: a Mirror, two Optimists, two RS Fevas, two Pacers, a Sabre, a Laser and a Corsair. A new sailor can finish the course and keep sailing all season without owning anything, then race from November onward in the Sunday program. Competition is structured but friendly — the Toyota Series, for instance, counts the best four results from five races across divisions — and the calendar adds regattas on every public holiday weekend plus the Eastern Regional Regatta, run in early February 2026.

Members also travel as a group each year to Port Albert, where they contest the annual South Gippsland Regatta. For coaching beyond the courses, professional help can be arranged through the club, and the racing fleet's mix of Impulse, ILCA, RS Aero, Sabre, Taipan and Mosquito means graduates graduate into real class racing rather than a cul-de-sac.

The club rooms stand at 22 The Esplanade, Inverloch, postcode 3996, directly on the foreshore of Anderson Inlet. Inverloch itself is a Bass Coast Shire seaside town 143 kilometres south-east of Melbourne, sitting at the inlet's mouth where it meets Bass Strait. The club's own description of its sailing water is worth quoting directly: "a varied seascape, often making racing fun and challenging". Anderson Inlet is a broad tidal estuary sheltered from the open ocean, and its racing waters shift character with the tide — wide and open at high water, threaded with channels and banks as the tide falls.

Those same traits impose hard limits. The water is shallow, the tides run hard, the sandbars shift, the entrance bar is treacherous, and keelboats cannot get in — which is precisely why this has always been, and remains, an off-the-beach club. For dinghy and cat sailors the constraints are features: protected water in almost any weather, tactical sandbank racing when the tide is low, and flat-water speed when it is high.

Ashore, the facilities are exactly what a beach club needs — club rooms on the foreshore, a launching ramp, and a substantial boat storage facility that local sailors rely on. The sponsor board reads like the town's business directory: Bass Coast Shire Council, Bendigo Bank Inverloch, Leongatha Toyota, Alex Scott & Staff, Mitre 10 Inverloch and the local Lions club — a fair measure of how woven into the town the club is.

Regatta coverage gets professional treatment too, with event videos shot by club member Oliver Hartas, who works professionally as a yachting-event videographer. It is a small-town sailing venue that knows exactly what it is.

Precision matters in this club's story, so here it is plainly: the year in which the present-day South Gippsland Yacht Club was founded appears nowhere on its website or in the public record consulted, and any account that quotes a date is guessing. What is documented is the lineage of sailing at Inverloch. An earlier Inverloch Yacht Club ran a race on 2 January 1893, when the town was a small, isolated seaside community, and regatta days followed — though the link between that body and today's club is unverified.

The inlet's second documented chapter is the famous one. In 1928 local man Len Morris designed an eleven-foot scow, the Inverloch Eleven Foot Class, and the first boat — Olive, named for his wife — survives on display at Albert Park Yacht Club. As sisters like Whoopee and Flutterby were built, an Inverloch yacht club organised around the class; Morris then renamed it the Moth after spotting the American Moth Boat in Rudder magazine, and Inverloch hosted the 1936 formation of the Victorian Moth Class Association.

The class went worldwide, and the Moth national championship trophy remains the Inverloch Silver Cup — an extraordinary legacy for one small inlet. The modern club's clearest milestone is the Inverloch Classic Wooden Dinghy Regatta, first run around 2015, reaching its eighth running in 2022 and tenth in 2024 and billed as the country's largest gathering of classic wooden dinghies.

Its trophies include the Ginn Cup for the overall winner and the Jack Carroll Memorial Trophy for Sailfish, and the February 2026 running marked seventy years since the Australian Sailfish appeared, with Brian Carroll — whose father Jack Carroll co-designed the class — out racing his own vintage boat. The 2015 regatta heard a speech from Jessica Watson OAM, introduced by Tom King OAM, a Mirror world champion and Olympic 470 gold medallist.

Gwen 12s, Mirrors, Herons, Flying Ants, Sabots, Rainbows, Finns, Cherubs and Minnows all turn up to race, keeping Inverloch's wooden-dinghy flame alight.