Warwick Sailing Club

About Warwick Sailing Club

Sailing in Queensland usually means salt water — coral seas, tidal estuaries, bay racing within sight of surf beaches. Warwick Sailing Club does things differently. Its home water is Lake Leslie, a freshwater storage on the Condamine River near Warwick in the Southern Downs, a district better known for cattle country, grain and winter frosts than for spinnakers. Yet here, on the north-eastern shore of a dam built for irrigation, a small affiliated club has kept boats racing through drought, falling water levels and the long distances that separate it from the coast. The club runs no website and maintains only a modest public presence; its footprint in the record comes through regatta notices and a memorable 2014 Courier-Mail report that found members still holding fortnightly regattas even as the dam shrank around them. Australian Sailing lists Warwick in affiliation fee category 21, the band set aside for the nation's smallest clubs — fitting company for an outfit whose regatta entry fee was thirty dollars and whose regatta accommodation was a tent on the grass. What the club lacks in scale it repays in persistence, and in a particular inland sailing culture: weekends planned around the water level gauge, trailer sailers towed for hours from the coast, and camping, courtesy buses and country pubs folded into the race program. For sailors who assume the sport belongs to the seaboard, Warwick is a quiet corrective. The club sits within the Southern Downs regional area, and its story is a reminder that Australian sailing is not only a coastal sport. Inland clubs like this one keep the sport alive in country towns where the nearest salt water is hours away, and they do it with a fraction of the membership base a bayside club enjoys.

Services

• Sailing club

Service area

Warwick, QLD