Lacepede Bay Sailing Club

Sailing waters

Ten kilometres offshore, the Margaret Brock Reef does this club an enormous favour: it breaks the Southern Ocean's force before it reaches Lacepede Bay, leaving racing water that one race notice described as having no surf, no big waves and no rocks — the only obstacles in the bay being the jetty and the boat-ramp rock wall. Behind the clubhouse, a hundred metres of lawn and sand separate the bar from a beach running some 180 kilometres, from Cape Jaffa in the south to the Murray Mouth in the north, one of the longest continuous sandy stretches any Australian sailing club can claim as its front yard.

The season opens in the third week of October and runs through to Easter, with racing on Saturdays — at half past two during daylight saving and two o'clock otherwise, though the community directory rounds the season as October to April with two o'clock starts. Fleets reflect the bay's versatility: a sailboard fleet of about fifteen races alongside catamarans and monohulls, and the club has a long association with the board side of the sport — eighteen sailboards contested the 1987 Lobster Regatta, where the Kingston Medical Clinic donated a special line-honour prize that doubled the dollar value of the highest recorded windspeed, twenty knots.

The club's signature test is the Earthmovers, a distance race of more than seventy kilometres sailed each April — documented in 2010 and 2011 with a thirty-dollar entry and handicap prizes for one, two and three laps — that sends fleets the length of the bay and back. Catamaran sailors who have raced it describe open-water distance with inshore comfort: exactly the combination the reef provides.