Altona Yacht Club

About Altona Yacht Club

Catamarans are the headline act at Altona Yacht Club, a volunteer-run dinghy and multihull club on the western shore of Port Phillip at Seaholme. There is no keelboat fleet here and no marina; boats are rigged on the grass at Cresser Reserve and wheeled straight across the sand into Altona Bay, which keeps the club's feet planted firmly in the off-the-beach tradition. That focus has made Altona a favoured venue for national and state title racing, particularly for the Arrow and Mosquito catamaran classes and the Impulse dinghy.

In recent seasons the club has run the combined 58th Arrow and 52nd Mosquito Australian Championships, a multi-day combined regatta that put more than 45 boats on the water off Altona Beach, along with the 40th Impulse nationals and Zoom8 state titles.

The membership is drawn mostly from Melbourne's western suburbs, and the club runs entirely on volunteer labour, from race officers in the tower to the people who built the clubhouse itself. Family involvement has been policy since the club's earliest days, and it remains the organising idea behind everything Altona does — its stated mission centres on active member participation, promoting sailing locally and keeping the place viable for the next generation.

A Victorian Government local-history grant citation went further, describing Altona as a nationally recognised training centre that produced top-level sailors from working-class, post-war beginnings. It is a club that measures itself less by silverware than by how many families are on the water each Saturday — though the silverware, accumulated across seven decades of championship hosting, is considerable all the same.

Services

• Sailing club

Service area

Seaholme, VIC