Walpole Yacht Club

Introduction

• Walpole Yacht Club is a small dinghy-focused sailing club located at Coalmine Beach on the Nornalup Inlet, on Western Australia’s south coast. The clubhouse and launching area sit inside the Walpole and Nornalup Inlets Marine Park, with native karri, red flowering gum and peppermint forest running down to the shoreline.

What the club does

• The club runs regular club meets and community sailing, supports dinghy racing and hosts the annual In the Trees Regatta over the Labour Day long weekend in March. It is a regional, family-oriented club that welcomes visiting sailors, trailer boats and families who use the Coalmine Beach boat ramp and nearby launching points.

Facilities and setting

• Facilities associated with the club include a jetty and nearby boat ramp at Coalmine Beach, beach launching and adjacent camping/accommodation at Coalmine Beach Holiday Park. The club’s location provides sheltered, tree-lined inlet water suitable for small boats and dinghies.

Walpole's teaching happens the way everything else happens here — hands-on, family-first and mostly outdoors. The club maintains a training fleet alongside a flotilla of club kayaks, both pitched at juniors and families; the season opening of December 2015 drew some fifty people, including families who had made the trip from Albany, with the youngest members paddling the kayaks and training boats.

Then-Commodore Maree Pickett confirmed that regional pull, reporting families travelling from Albany specifically for club events — a significant draw for a town of Walpole's size. Formal learn-to-sail structure is where honesty is required: no Australian Sailing Discover Sailing Centre accreditation or branded training program could be verified for the club, so nothing of that kind should be assumed. What is documented is a club that teaches by inclusion.

It promotes sailing together with swimming, canoeing, fishing and power boating among people and families across the Walpole, Manjimup and Denmark shires, and class notes compiled by Shelley Sailing Club record Windrush 14 catamarans being sailed at Walpole — the Perth-designed fourteen-footer that suits exactly this kind of sheltered inlet water. In practice, small regional clubs of this type generally induct newcomers informally — a borrowed boat, a crewing spot, a parent-and-child paddle graduating to a sail — and Walpole's training fleet and kayaks exist precisely for that pattern, though visitors should confirm current arrangements directly.

The centrepiece of the participation calendar needs no accreditation at all: the In the Trees Regatta is pitched as a safe, family-focused occasion and a perfect way to sample the Walpole and Nornalup Inlets Marine Park, with racing on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning and catering laid on.

The Nornalup Inlet is the club's racecourse, and it is unlike any other on this list. The inlet belongs to a connected system watered by the Frankland and Deep rivers — streams canoeists have long celebrated for their wilderness character — and the whole complex lies within the Walpole and Nornalup Inlets Marine Park, which covers both inlets plus the tidal reaches of the Frankland, Deep and Walpole rivers.

The system's two basins have distinct personalities: Walpole Inlet is shallow, reaching barely a metre at its deepest, while Nornalup Inlet runs to about five metres, and a one-kilometre channel at The Knolls joins them. Coalmine Beach, where the clubhouse stands, puts sailors straight onto the deeper basin — flat, protected, tree-lined water where the wind arrives filtered through karri forest and a capsize means a swim, not a rescue.

Launching options stud the shoreline: the Coalmine Beach boat ramp beside the club, plus ramps at Rest Point, the Walpole town jetty, Isle Road and Nornalup. The setting is national-park country in every direction — karri, red flowering gum and peppermint forest running down to the water — which explains both the regatta's name and the club's by-its-own-account reputation among sailors as one of the world's top ten sailing locations.

The club's own history records how much of this water early members left unexplored: the first sailing stayed confined to Swan Bay, and only later did crews feel confident enough to take on the broader Nornalup Inlet. Today's regatta fleets range far more widely, but the essential bargain is unchanged — wilderness water, sailed gently, inside a marine park no other Australian yacht club can call home.

The club's beginning reads like a parable of country enterprise. In 1956 local boat builder Terry Swarbrick purchased a VJ — a twelve-foot two-crew dinghy — from a tourist who was holidaying at Rest Point, then sailed it past Claude Cooper and his son Frank in Swan Bay; the sight, by the local account, sparked district interest almost immediately. A club took shape around 1957-58 with Swarbrick as Commodore, Claude Cooper in the vice-commodore's role, Harley Swarbrick stepping in as Rear Commodore while Don Hadfield combined the secretary and treasurer jobs.

The Walpole-Nornalup District Historical Society timeline supplies the precise scaffolding: an inaugural meeting on 13 February 1958, a first public meeting a fortnight later on 27 February, a decision in April 1958 to abandon Swan Bay for Coalmine Beach, and a lean-to boatshed built with jetty construction under way there by late 1958. A first small regatta took place in Swan Bay that same year, and the club's own website records that it became formal in 1958 before shifting to Coalmine Beach in 1959.

That year delivered the foundations in earnest: a lease and permit to build, a jetty completed from timber salvaged out of the old Kent River Sawmill; March 1959 brought the first official regatta to draw visiting boats, and an official opening on 23 November 1959 saw Lady Walpole appear before a crowd of spectators. Consolidation followed — a 21-year lease in 1961 at five pounds a year, foreshore reclaimed with sleepers taken from the Nornalup Railway, a boat ramp beside the jetty arriving in 1962, and a starter's box added at the jetty's end in 1963.

The early fleet was VJs and Moths, sailed with a certain flair: one enterprising member reportedly fashioned a spinnaker from an old parachute, and the local history recalls crews who, by their own rueful account, passed more of their time inverted in the water than upright and sailing. Photographs in the district collection show regattas with Sharpies from around 1960 and the fleet gathered at the Nornalup Inlet jetty through the 1970s — the visual record of a club the bush never swallowed.