Brisbane Valley Sailing Club

About Brisbane Valley Sailing Club

Brisbane Valley Sailing Club is a Queensland sailing or boating organisation associated with Lake Wivenhoe, QLD (northern shores of Wivenhoe Dam). It appears on Australian Sailing's 2026-27 Queensland affiliated-club schedule at Band 22, which provides a current governing-body verification signal. Brisbane Valley Sailing Club is a small, community sailing club based on the northern shores of Wivenhoe Dam (Lake Wivenhoe) in Queensland.

The club runs racing for off-the-beach single- and multi-hull boats, holds club events at Hayes Landing, and organises an annual Winter Marathon (open-invitation event held at Logan’s Inlet). The club describes a long history (40+ years) and a small membership (around 10–15 members). Contact, website and location data in this enriched record were retained from the source dataset and updated where a reliable current public source was located; source and verification columns show the evidence and remaining gaps.

Training and sailing programs

Honesty first: Brisbane Valley runs no learn-to-sail program, no Tackers courses and no Discover Sailing operation, and its website offers no training pathway at all. With a membership of ten to fifteen experienced hands, the club's energy flows entirely into racing — newcomers wanting instruction should look to the larger training clubs around Brisbane, while sailors who can already handle a boat will find a warm welcome and a start line here.

The year's unquestioned centrepiece is the Winter Marathon, an open off-the-beach fixture sailed over the first weekend of June from Logan's Inlet. Up to a hundred boats typically make the trip — an organisational feat for a committee small enough to seat at one picnic table — drawn by long-format lake racing and the inlet's modern camping ground. Around that anchor, the club conducts a season of regular races from Hayes Landing open to any trailerable dinghy or multihull, governed by a published calendar and formal sailing instructions; the 2025–26 season documentation is already current, a level of administrative diligence many larger clubs would envy.

The fleet is eclectic by design: dinghies and cats of varied pedigree, with Weta trimarans featuring strongly in recent club imagery. No formal class list is published, because the entry rule is effectively "if it fits on a trailer, bring it". That openness, sustained for nearly five decades, is the club's real program. Visitors towing a boat to the marathon need nothing more than the published sailing instructions and a camping booking; the welcome, by all accounts, does the rest.

Club history

It began, the club's own account records, with two men sitting on a bank. In the early months of 1978 Fred Weber and Barry Neden were talking sailing beside Atkinson's Dam when the idea of a club took hold. They placed a notice in the Queensland Times calling interested sailors together; a steering committee emerged from the first gathering, and at the second general meeting Barry Neden took the helm as inaugural Commodore, with Barry Kilmister of Gatton as first Secretary.

Racing commenced that September on Atkinson's Dam, the fleet comprising mostly dinghies with a handful of catamarans. Ambition reached further almost immediately: during that first year the club approached the Co-ordinator General's Department — the state authority then building Wivenhoe Dam — seeking a sailing site on the future lake. Permission to use the Billies Bay and Hayes Inlet area arrived in the early 1980s, yet sailing there only began in 1987, and initially on a members-only footing, with fishermen and other lake users admitted as associate members.

Corporate structure followed in 2006, when the body incorporated as Brisbane Valley Sailing Club Inc. A decade later the balance with the public shifted again: Seqwater's 2016 re-opening of Hays Landing and Billy's Bay, with upgraded facilities, ended the exclusive-access era while delivering the best shore infrastructure the club has enjoyed. Through every chapter the Winter Marathon has grown in stature — a hundred-boat open event delivered annually by one of the smallest memberships in Queensland sailing, and a quietly remarkable organisational achievement.