Maylands Yacht Club

About Maylands Yacht Club

Every junior sailing club has a workhorse training boat, but very few can claim one of their own invention. Maylands Yacht Club is the home of the Mudlark, a junior class designed and built by Wally Gaunt — foundation commodore, driving force behind the club's postwar clubhouse and father of longtime Club Patron Terry Gaunt Snr. That single lineage captures the flavour of the place: a small, self-reliant river club where members have always made what they needed, from boats to buildings.

The club's own tagline declares it the sailing club "at the top of the river", and the geography is no small part of its charm. Perched on the Swan River foreshore at Maylands, it sits less than five kilometres from the Perth CBD yet roughly twenty-five kilometres upriver from Fremantle — a fresh-feeling, tree-lined stretch of water far removed from the big-fleet scene downstream. The clubhouse itself is heritage-listed on the State Heritage Office inHerit database, recognition of more than a century of organised sailing from this shoreline.

Competitive sailing here reaches back to 1913-14, when the original Maylands Sailing Club began racing from the old East Street jetty, and the formally constituted club dates from 1946. In the decades since, it has produced State, National and International champions — names such as Brian Plumb, Cliff Burton, Rob O'Sullivan and Terry Gaunt Snr — while remaining firmly a community club. As an accredited Australian Sailing Discover Sailing Centre it feeds new sailors into the sport each season, and its Mirror fleet is, by the club's own account, the largest in Western Australia. There is even a published history, "Top of the River", written by Chris Holyday with Terry Gaunt Snr, on sale at the bar for anyone curious about how this pocket of the Swan became a sailing stronghold.

Services

• Sailing club

Service area

Maylands, WA