Bendigo Yacht Club

Sailing waters

Lake Eppalock is a big inland sea by Victorian standards — around 8,000 acres at full capacity with an average depth near 31 feet — a Campaspe River impoundment lying between Bendigo and Heathcote. The club sits at 45 Sunset Drive on the lake's shore. Reservoir sailing has its own character: the water level rises and falls with irrigation demand, the surrounding farmland and low hills funnel the wind in shifting patterns, and the sheer size of the lake means courses can be set well clear of any shore effects. Those changeable conditions are precisely what the club credits with toughening its best sailors.

The facility list is more holiday park than yacht club, and proudly so. The clubhouse comes with kitchen, lounge, television, bathrooms and decking; there's a licensed bar on weekends, a huge barbecue with indoor and outdoor dining, a jetty, a swimming area, boat storage, launching ramps, rescue facilities, a playground, camping grounds and a handful of caravan-park spaces. Families can — and do — make a full weekend of it, camping by the lake while the sailing unfolds around them. Members' unlimited 24/7 access extends that hospitality year-round.

The lake itself is comparatively young. Works officially commenced on 9 June 1960, when Sir Henry Bolte, the Premier, detonated the first charge, and the reservoir was officially opened by Bolte in April 1964, at the time Victoria's fourth-largest, holding over 250,000 acre-feet. The sailing club was formed while the lake was still filling, and the two have grown up together: irrigation storage by design, but in practice one of central Victoria's great recreational waterways, with the yacht club as its most decorated tenant.