Mandurah Offshore Fishing & Sailing Club

Training and sailing programs

Junior sailing is where Mandurah's training effort concentrates, and the club backs it with resources most volunteer organisations can only envy: a large junior section directed by a full-time professional coach. The class structure supports that ambition, with a pathway running from Optimists and Open BICs through Lasers, Pacers, RS Fevas and 29ers to Tasars, so young sailors can progress from their first hull to fast skiff-style racing without leaving the club. Regular twilight cruises round out the on-water offering for those after a gentler introduction.

The club's most distinctive program, though, belongs to accessible sailing. Mandurah offers sailing opportunities for people of all abilities using specially designed accessible single and double sailboats — one of them electronically operated — opening the sport to participants whom conventional dinghies exclude. It is the kind of provision that very few Australian clubs attempt, and it sits naturally beside the junior program as evidence of a club that treats access to the water as its core business.

As an Australian Sailing training centre, the club also appears in the national course finder delivering Safety Boat Operator courses, the qualification that underpins safe race management and training support everywhere. Power boaters are catered for with well-organised events, and the club boat gives members without their own vessel a route onto the water for fishing.

Underpinning all of it is infrastructure that training programs elsewhere would covet: four boat-launching ramps, a 220-bay floating marina and a two-hundred-metre jetty for visiting boats. Add the keelboat divisions and their regular racing, and the pathway from a child's first Optimist lesson to ocean racing off Comet Bay can be travelled entirely within one membership.

Club history

The modern club is a marriage, and both partners brought solid histories to it. In 2000, the Mandurah Yacht Club — established in 1969 — merged with the Mandurah Offshore Fishing Club — established in 1972 — to form the organisation that carries both pursuits in its name today. The union created something larger than the sum of its parts: a club that could cater for ocean racing sailors, estuary cruisers, power boaters and anglers under one constitution and one clubhouse roof. In August 2021 members gathered to celebrate the merged club's twentieth birthday, an occasion Australian Sailing marked with a club-in-focus feature.

That note of deliberate detail runs through the club's story. Consider its role in the Mandurah artificial reef: before the structure was deployed off the coast in April 2016, club volunteers consulted with Recfishwest on its placement, even lowering cameras to the seafloor to inspect candidate sites. It was a practical, skilful contribution from a membership that knows these waters intimately — the fishing arm of the club acting on behalf of the whole recreational boating community.

The sailing arm brought its own lineage. The Mandurah Yacht Club's three decades before the merger laid down the racing tradition that the combined club inherited, culminating in events such as the 2014/15 Australian Laser Open and Masters Nationals, and in the enduring offshore partnership with Fremantle Sailing Club behind the Halls Head Race and Point Robert Return. The Finistere Cup, introduced by the two clubs to honour members lost to both, gives that rivalry a solemn heart. From two modest clubs founded within three years of each other, Mandurah has built a single institution now counted — by membership at least — among the biggest boating organisations in the nation.