Warneet Motor Yacht Club

Some clubs have to earn seniority; Warneet Motor Yacht Club simply states it. "Proudly Westernport's Oldest Yacht Club" is the club's own banner, and by its account it was the first yacht club established on Western Port, the great tidal bay south-east of Melbourne, formed in February 1952. More than seventy years on — the club marked its seventieth anniversary in 2022 — it remains anchored in the same spot on Rutherford Inlet at Warneet, in the City of Casey.

The "Motor" in the name hints at the club's breadth. This is a cruising, racing and social club that opens its doors to non-sailing members too, and the Save the Warneet Jetties group describes it as "as much a community hub as a yacht club", offering a base for community groups across Warneet and the wider City of Casey. The club's self-bestowed nickname is "the jewel in the crown of Warneet" — an immodest phrase, but one backed by decades of local institution-building. It is an affiliated member of Australian Sailing, with Commodore Alex Stroud at the helm and mail directed to PO Box 315, Tooradin.

Its flagship occasion, the Warneet Around French Island Race, is a long-running fixture of Victorian distance sailing and has drawn fields exceeding two hundred yachts in its biggest years. Around that anchor sit trailable-yacht cruises, Friday raffles and barbecues, open-mic afternoons and movie nights — the program of a club that takes its social charter as seriously as its racing, and that has done so since the foreshore-pavilion meetings of 1952.

Formal learn-to-sail programs are not where Warneet's energy goes: no accredited training centre, Tackers course or sailing school appears in the club's published material, and it would be wrong to imply otherwise. What the club programs instead, with seven decades of practice, is events — and none looms larger than the Warneet Around French Island Race. WAFIR, as everyone calls it, circumnavigates French Island in Western Port and has, by the club's figures, attracted fields of well over two hundred competing yachts and more than ten thousand participants across forty-five years, as of 2018. The golden-anniversary edition is set down for 21 November 2026.

The race has rituals of its own: a Friday-night briefing, an 0500 breakfast, and a spit-roast presentation dinner. The 2018 edition drew thirty-nine entrants to a 7 am start in light airs before a sea-breeze spinnaker run carried the fleet home. The entry list is dominated by trailable yachts and multihulls — the 2025 race included Timpenny 670 and 770, Magic 25, Farr 6000, RL24, Careel 22, Southern Cross 23 and Noelex 25 designs, plus Couta boats and Haynes Hunter tris — drawn from Warneet, Hastings, Westernport and the Melbourne Trailable Yacht Club.

That trailable connection runs deep. The club hosts Melbourne Trailable Yacht Club fixtures including the Warneet–Hastings Cruise, the Tooradin Lunch Cruise and the Sandy Point Cruise, plus a joint Christmas party between the two clubs. Ashore, the social calendar fills in everything else: Friday raffles and barbecues, monthly Open Mic afternoons on the first Sunday, and Saturday movie nights — a rolling schedule that explains why the club counts non-sailing members among its own.

Warneet is a small coastal village of around five hundred people on Western Port, roughly fifty-six kilometres south-east of Melbourne near Tooradin. Once known as Crouch's Beach, it remains a place oriented toward fishing and boating, and the clubhouse sits on Rutherford Inlet with the bay spread out in front; the expansive decking added in the 2018 rebuild takes full advantage of the outlook.

The local boating infrastructure carries the club's fingerprints. Toward the close of the 1960s the club pushed through construction of a launching ramp and the six-hundred-foot Warneet South Jetty, with the Warneet South Slipway Club formed to run them; the Warneet North Jetty and boat club facilities serve the other side of the village. These jetties matter so much locally that a dedicated Save the Warneet Jetties campaign formed when closures loomed — and that campaign counts the yacht club among its partners in the fight to keep the town's water access alive.

The sailing water is Western Port itself: a large, shallow, tide-worked bay of channels, banks and islands. The club's signature racecourse makes full use of it, circumnavigating French Island, the bay's great central landmass, in a single day's racing. For cruisers, the bay offers destinations such as Hastings, Tooradin and Sandy Point, all of which appear on the trailable-yacht calendar the club hosts. It is genuine cruising territory — sheltered from ocean swell, threaded with channels that keep navigators honest, and quiet enough that a village of five hundred can sustain one of the state's older yacht clubs.

The founding of Warneet Motor Yacht Club is unusually well documented for a club of its size. In late January 1952, eleven locals gathered in Warneet's foreshore pavilion and agreed that Westernport needed a boating and angling club; the club was formally constituted on 8 February 1952, and on 8 March thirty-six people assembled to elect office-bearers. The pace never slackened: the first year alone saw at least thirty-seven meetings and twenty-five working bees, and building the clubhouse began immediately, with the Warneet Progress Association — formed in December 1945 and now the Warneet Association — overseeing the club's construction.

The 1950s made Warneet a water-sport centre: Victorian championship racing across several classes took place there, and the Westernport Challenge originated at the club. The following decades added infrastructure and responsibility — the launching ramp and South Jetty at the end of the 1960s, a place for the clubhouse in the Warneet Disaster Plan, and a radio room established in 1969 that grew into a twenty-four-hour watch by 1973 and was upgraded in 1974 to communicate with yachts out in Bass Strait. The radio facilities were housed in what became known as the Tamo house, after Bill and Alwyn Tamo, pillars of the club from its earliest days and now life members; Bill Tamo served as Commodore from 1956 to 1972.

Multihulls run through the club's mid-century story. Four Warneet multihulls contested the Queenscliff–Devonport Race, with Gary Bodworth's Shilo taking line honours in 1977, and the Multihull Yacht Club of Victoria folded into Warneet in 1979. The club incorporated as the Warneet Motor Yacht Club in 1984. In December 2018 a fully rebuilt clubhouse opened with expansive decking, and in November 2025 the Warneet Association celebrated its own eightieth anniversary beneath that roof — two institutions still sharing the same foreshore, as they have since 1952.