The Cruising Yacht Club of WA

About The Cruising Yacht Club of WA

The Cruising Yacht Club of WA exists, in a sense, because a Governor had an idea. During the 1955-56 season, while Royal Freshwater Bay Yacht Club was running the Prince Phillip Cup for the Dragon class, then-Governor Sir Charles Gairdner floated the suggestion that Cockburn Sound could stage a regatta on the model of Cowes. Talks followed in May 1956 between officials of Royal Freshwater Bay and a local Rockingham circle known as the Friday Club; by November that year the Cruising Yacht Club had been formed, and a clubhouse stood on the Rockingham waterfront by 1958. The present two-storey rendered-brick building at 2 Val Street — crowned by a steel-clad lookout tower styled like a ship's control bridge — gazes out across Cockburn Sound toward Garden Island from the same foreshore strip. The club sits in Australian Sailing's top affiliation category and runs one of the state's busiest programs: an accredited Discover Sailing Centre, off-the-beach and keelboat racing across Mangles Bay and the Sound, and the Cockburn Sound Regatta each Christmas-to-New-Year window, an event billed, with a grin, as for serious sailors having serious fun. Its most consequential offshoot, though, is one few yacht clubs anywhere can match: Marine Rescue Rockingham, the volunteer sea-rescue service, grew directly out of the club's Power Boat section around 1979-80. The club's own description is of a private club run for members and their guests, offering restaurant, function and fully licensed bar facilities together with moorings plus a hardstand at Point Peron. For a club approaching its seventieth year, the breadth of that offer is striking.

Services

• Sailing club

Service area

Rockingham, WA