Flinders Yacht Club

About Flinders Yacht Club

Every summer the population of Flinders swells with holidaymakers, and the little yacht club on the foreshore swells with them. Flinders Yacht Club is, by design, a holiday sailing club: its season runs from November to April with racing every Sunday, and its membership mixes locals with families who return to this corner of Western Port year after year. The fleet reflects the place.

Off-the-beach dinghies launch straight from the sand in front of the clubhouse, while the keel boat and couta boat fleet lies on moorings at Flinders Pier, their tenders either launched at the pier ramp or kept in the club's secure compound. The club has occupied its beachfront position since 1976, looking out across Westernport Bay toward Phillip Island, and it runs on volunteer energy — an active committee of sailors steers the program, with a junior committee making sure events carry something for the kids as well.

That junior thread runs deep here: the children's party after the annual sailing school, with its celebrated ice-cream eating competition, is as much a fixture as any trophy race. The clubhouse itself, with a large function room and a deck overlooking the bay, does double duty as a community venue, hired for weddings, birthdays and meetings by local groups such as the Flinders Lions Club.

Racing is serious enough — aggregate and championship series, twilight and ocean events, even a race across to Cowes — but the club's real measure is the number of families who learned to sail here on their holidays and kept coming back.

Services

• Sailing club

Service area

Flinders VIC