Cowes Yacht Club

About Cowes Yacht Club

Nearly everything you see at Cowes Yacht Club was put there by its own members' hands. Perched on a north-facing beach at Cowes, the main town on Phillip Island, the club looks straight across Western Port toward the Mornington Peninsula and runs a dual sailing life: off-the-beach boats and trailer yachts, with social members folded warmly into the mix. The volunteer building tradition is not a quaint historical footnote but the club's defining trait — clubhouse, ramps and extensions were largely raised by members' own labour, from hand-dug foundations in the early 1960s to a heavy timber ramp engineered to resist the sea and shipworm. That self-reliance once extended well beyond the club's own fence: Cowes was a founding force in the Western Port Safety Council, the volunteer radio and rescue network the region's clubs created because no government coverage existed, and its rescue boat Trojan famously helped save all eighty passengers when the Eagle Star ferry, inbound from Stoney Point, went down near the Cowes jetty. Racing carries a neighbourly edge. Cowes maintains a long triangular rivalry with Phillip Island's other clubs, Rhyll Yacht Club and Newhaven Yacht Squadron, contesting a series trophy in trailable yachts, and it is part of Yachting Western Port, the association that runs the bay's Challenge series events for off-the-beach boats, junior skippers, keel boats, trailer yachts and multihulls. An annual Discover Sailing Day each January keeps the door open to holidaymakers and locals alike. For families basing a Phillip Island summer around the water, Cowes is the natural harbour: unpretentious, handy to town, and run by people who built it themselves.

Services

• Sailing club

Service area

Cowes, VIC