Yarrawonga Yacht Club

Introduction

• Yarrawonga Yacht Club is a volunteer-run, family-friendly club located on the Yarrawonga shore of Lake Mulwala. The clubhouse and launch facilities sit on River Road with permanent frontage to the lake, allowing lawn-to-water launching and concrete ramps for trailable yachts.

Programmes and Activities

• The club runs regular club sailing on Saturdays and operates a strong learn-to-sail programme for juniors and adults. It hosts two annual regattas (Australia Day and Anzac Day events) that commonly attract visiting competitors and sometimes carry state-class championships.
• In addition to on-water sailing, the club supports radio-controlled yacht racing and a broad paddling programme that includes dragon boat crews, outrigger canoes, kayaks and paddleboards. There is a lively social calendar, including a regular Friday evening Happy Hour.

Facilities and Visiting Information

• Facilities include club lawns that reach the waterline, twin off-the-beach launching bays with sandy bottoms, at least one all-weather concrete ramp, sheltered moorings and foreshore camping for regatta weekends. The site converts to a boat park and powered grassed camping during events. The club runs a canteen and bar during regattas and maintains a working programme of sponsors and local supporters.

Local Setting

• The club faces Lake Mulwala, a large impoundment of the Murray River that spans the Victoria–New South Wales border. The lake provides broad inland sailing waters and local recreational amenities in the twin towns of Yarrawonga and Mulwala.

Rather than adopting an off-the-shelf national syllabus, the club wrote its own junior pathway — five graded levels taking eight-to-fourteen-year-olds from their first rigging lesson through to racing and two-up crewing. Courses run as six ninety-minute sessions on Saturday mornings across summer, priced at a family-friendly $70, and the club supplies Optimist dinghies for the opening three levels so nobody needs to buy a boat to begin.

The parallel adult stream, open from age fifteen, teaches on Hobie Wave catamarans or Pacers and offers time aboard members' trailable yachts; its stated goal is delightfully pragmatic, aiming to turn parents into crews for their own children. No Tackers or Discover Sailing Centre branding appears in club material — these courses are local inventions. Competition opportunities peak at the two marquee regattas.

The Australia Day fixture, five races across two days, is pitched as a laid-back reunion after the Christmas Nationals and sits conveniently central to Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and Adelaide; recent editions have doubled as state titles, including the 2025 Victorian championship for the Explorer 16 class. The Anzac Day regatta has likewise incorporated the Victorian Impulse championship and features on the RS Aero national travellers circuit. Foreshore camping makes both events affordable weekends away.

Perhaps the clearest proof of the club's breadth: it hosted the 2016 national championships of the RC Laser class, confirming the radio-controlled fleet as serious competitors in their own right. The learn-to-sail operation is backed by local sponsors, including the Ken Yap Golden Inn at Mulwala Water Ski Club and Whitworths Marine and Leisure, which helps keep course fees at the accessible end of the scale.

You will find the clubhouse at 87 River Road, Yarrawonga, where a reclaimed foreshore block gives the club permanent frontage on Lake Mulwala with water at the doorstep twelve months a year. The lake itself is the asset — one of the Murray system's great impoundments, spread across the state line and big enough to offer genuine open-water sailing well beyond most inland venues. Practical arrangements are generous.

Boats launch straight off the clubhouse lawns, or from a pair of concrete ramps, one an all-weather facility dropping into the protected Chinamans Island lagoon, which also carries moorings; trailable yachts lie in a sheltered mooring ground nearby. When regattas arrive, the site converts into camping ground and boat park combined: powered grassed sites for tents and caravans at the shoreline, twin off-the-beach launching bays with sandy bottoms, and a working canteen.

The water in front of the clubhouse suits novices particularly well, remaining only waist deep for roughly forty metres offshore — beginners can stand, right a boat and try again. The club does not publish wind statistics for its courses, though lake weed has historically been controlled by the Murray-Darling Basin Authority. Non-sailing visitors are catered for too: a two-kilometre return walking track to Chinamans Island departs from the club grounds and crosses wetlands celebrated locally for birdwatching.

The twin towns of Yarrawonga and Mulwala, facing each other across the lake, form one of the Murray's busiest holiday districts, so visiting sailors find accommodation, dining and supplies within minutes of the boat park.

A weekend away started it all. Tom Hanrahan and Don Forbes travelled to Lake Boga near Mildura, watched the yachts racing there, and returned determined to replicate the scene; on 5 September 1938 their new club was constituted, Lake Boga Yacht Club passing across Moth Class Association contacts and organisational know-how. That same year, with the lake newly cleared, John Wilson's boat made the first sail on it.

Foundation families included the Hargraves, the Briggs, Harry Haebich, William Pretty, William Boyd, Charles French, John Grant and Stan Victor. Hanrahan, an accountant by trade, kept the books for about fifteen years, while volunteers raised a first clubhouse beside the Yarrawonga bridge under a 125-pound contract with builder Norman Hallett. War shut the club almost at once — it recessed after September 1939 and only stirred again when the Mulwala Explosives Factory's manager sought recreation for his workforce, an intervention that lifted membership beyond sixty.

The post-war club was remarkably industrious. Alec Ross, formerly of Royal St Kilda, brought in the international Penguin dinghy and secured fleet charter number 29 from its American headquarters in February 1948, with local builders turning out Penguins in Yarrawonga and Albury. W. F. Tuttle financed six locally built Moths across 1950–51, and evening-class boatbuilding at Yarrawonga High School and Wangaratta later produced Fireballs and Mirrors.

Staging the 1958 Australian Moth Championship "gave the club a great name in sailing", as the club history puts it. The 1968 ANA Regatta — today's Australia Day event — attracted 121 starters, and in 1969–70 the club quit the bridge foreshore for its present River Road site, celebrating seventy-five years there in 2013.