Batemans Bay Sailing Club

About Batemans Bay Sailing Club

Around seventy members, roughly six boats on the line in a typical bay race — and yet, as Vice Commodore Lachlan Brown puts it, for that number of members it's a very active club. Batemans Bay Sailing Club is the small, committed heart of sailing on the Eurobodalla coast, a volunteer outfit whose members simply love sailing on Batemans Bay and Coila Lake, in Brown's words, and who have kept racing on both, most weeks of the year, since 1974.

The club's character comes from covering two kinds of sailing at once. Keelboats race on Batemans Bay and the Clyde River, while an off-the-beach program for trailable dinghies and multihulls has run for almost fifty years, much of it now based on Coila Lake near Tuross Head. Racing and cruising sailors share the club equally, and the calendar stretches through winter with a series the club calls "Champagne sailing".

The signature event is the d'Albora Batemans Bay Marina Regatta, a two-day fixture staged annually on the weekend nearest Anzac Day. It draws competitors from interstate in off-the-beach dinghies, trailer sailers and catamarans — some chasing state and national titles — and it anchors the club's place on the regional NSW program. The social side matches the sailing: regular dinners and events, and drinks and barbecues at Coila Lake after racing. The town itself stands where the Clyde River meets the sea — a bay Captain Cook named in 1770 — on the stretch of coast Canberrans have long claimed as their own, which helps explain a membership drawn from well beyond the bay.

Services

• Sailing club

Service area

Batemans Bay, Eurobodalla coast, NSW