Koombana Bay Sailing Club

Training and sailing programs

Learn-to-sail work at Koombana Bay is neither an add-on nor a marketing line; the expansion of junior sailing sat at the heart of the initiatives recognised by its 2021 state club-of-the-year award. The club runs Learn to Sail courses alongside keelboat crewing and helming programmes, all delivered by Australian Sailing qualified instructors. The keelboat arm is a particular point of difference: trainees learn their craft aboard an S80, the same Swarbrick-designed eight-metre class that races in the club's own fleet, so a graduate can step almost seamlessly from the training boat onto a competitive start line.

For younger sailors, the club promotes a thoughtful ladder of classes. The O'pen Bic gives beginners a lively modern trainer; the Mirror offers a more traditional two-handed pathway; the Jay Dee junior dinghy remains a West Australian staple; and the Mudlark — a WA-designed seven-foot single-handed trainer for six-to-twelve-year-olds — rounds out the junior options. That spread lets families match a child to the right boat at the right stage rather than forcing everyone through a single class, and it reflects decades of dinghy culture at Bunbury stretching back to the VJs and Sharpies of the club's earliest fleets.

Adults are not an afterthought. Keelboat crewing and helming courses give grown-up beginners a realistic route into the sport without buying a boat, and the club's use of SailPass lowers the threshold for social members curious about trying a sail. Once hooked, new sailors find Wednesday twilight sessions and Saturday racing waiting for them, with four handicap classes ensuring that a fresh crew in a small dinghy and an experienced keelboat team both find their level. In short, the pathway from first lesson to Saturday starter is short, well signposted and run by people who took it themselves.

Club history

It started with a newcomer asking an obvious question. When John Allen arrived in Bunbury in 1954 and discovered the town had no sailing club, he recruited two friends and set about fixing the omission. The founding meeting of the Bunbury Sailing Club convened on 29 August that year at the Bunbury Rowing Club, with John Roberts in the chair and Allen taking the Secretary-Treasurer role; joining as a foundation member cost two guineas. Progress came fast.

Official opening day on the North Shore came on 4 December, Mayor FJ Withers doing the honours; more than a hundred spectators watched the first race, and Roberts' Mustang sailed into the record books as its winner. A fortnight later, at the eighth general meeting on 18 December, members resolved to rename the organisation Koombana Bay Sailing Club and elected Norman Parker as Commodore.

The building phase was characteristically enterprising. A £200 loan financed the first clubhouse, built around a tubular steel frame sourced for £83/10/- from Fremantle firm Tubular Steel Constructions, and within four months the young club held land, a clubhouse, thirty-four senior and junior members and seven associates. A decade of patient negotiation for a land grant followed, culminating in a new $25,000 clubhouse — supported by a $12,000 loan — which WA Premier Sir David Brand declared open on 5 March 1967, with a permanent jetty and launching ramp built in the same period.

On the water, the early fleets were Vaucluse Juniors bought second-hand for £45 to £60 apiece, joined from 1959 by Lightweight Sharpies, Colin Goodlad's Robese being the first of that class in Bunbury. By the 1970s the club was hosting major titles, among them the 18th Skate National titles and the 35th Commonwealth VJ titles. Seventy years after Allen's knock on his friends' doors, in October 2024, members gathered to celebrate an anniversary that traced all the way back to that two-guinea beginning.