Somers Yacht Club

About Somers Yacht Club

By the numbers, Somers Yacht Club is one of the more remarkable off-the-beach operations in Victoria. When Australian Sailing profiled the club in 2022 it counted 781 members over the age of eight, split almost evenly between sailing and social members, with nearly two hundred juniors on the books. The statistic that really stands out, though, is gender: 48 percent of the membership is female, and around 40 percent of the sailors on the water are women and girls — figures most Australian sailing clubs can only envy. Club racing regularly puts sixty off-the-beach boats on the course, crewed by sailors aged from seven to eighty-four.

The club calls itself a club for members run by members, and its stated mission is to be "a volunteer, inclusive community where sailing unites families and friends". It sits in Category B of Australian Sailing's affiliation scale, and everything about it — the foreshore clubhouse, the rescue boats crewed by volunteers, the Friday night bar — reflects that self-description.

The location helps: Somers sits at the Mornington Peninsula's south-eastern tip on Western Port Bay, a bush-fringed shoreline where reliable afternoon southerlies blow in off Bass Strait. The fleet is purely off-the-beach, a mixed armada of catamarans and monohulls from A Class cats down to Optimists. More than half the members are not permanent Somers residents — they come from Melbourne and beyond because the sailing, and the community built around it, is worth the drive. For a village of about two thousand people, that is some pull.

Services

• Sailing club

Service area

Somers, VIC (Mornington Peninsula)