New England Sailing Club

About New England Sailing Club

New England Sailing Club appears to be a local sailing/yacht club serving Copeton (near Inverell), NSW. The club is presented as an organised sailing club that would typically run member activities and sailing programs, based on its listing in a regional handbook.

Public contact information is available via phone.

Training and sailing programs

Junior development is not a side project here; it is written into the club's constitution. The club's stated aims include teaching juniors the arts of sailing, setting up and running instruction classes, assisting and coaching members to sharpen their skills, and running a dedicated junior sailing and racing program. That formal commitment shapes a season in which club sailing runs every Saturday from two o'clock between the start of October and the beginning of May, giving families a dependable weekly rhythm across the warmer half of the year.

The learning environment is unusual. The season opens again in early September with a sailing meet on water still cold enough that wetsuits are standard kit, as former Commodore Andrew Sawyer has noted — an education in dressing for the conditions that coastal kids never get. Having an Olympic medallist and A Class world champion around the place does the coaching culture no harm either, and the fleet mix keeps things lively: catamarans and conventional dinghies share the water with wing foilers and windsurfers, so newer sailing disciplines find a home alongside the traditional ones.

The club's inter-club ambitions keep improving sailors pointed outward. Lasers have featured in plans for a zone regatta and a travelling inland series connecting coastal clubs with Carcoar Dam and Grafton, an idea Sawyer championed in 2019 to strengthen inland sailing generally. Membership categories run from Junior through Senior, Family, Honorary, Life and Affiliate, keeping the door open to every configuration of sailing household, and the annual regatta each March gives the season's training a focal point on home water.

Club history

The club's documented story begins with its water rather than its founders — no founding date appears in the club's own material or local coverage. What is certain is that the club's existence is tied to Malpas Dam, finished in 1968 to supply Armidale's water in place of Dumaresq Dam, built back in 1896–98. Informal aquatic competition on the new dam followed within a couple of decades, with inter-club regattas recorded from 1989, and the sailing club grew into an incorporated association affiliated with Australian Sailing, promoting the sport across the New England.

Rivalry has done as much as anything to define the club's competitive identity. The Thunderbolt Trophy series against Lake Keepit Sailing Club "has been going on for donkey's years" by local reckoning, with one heat traditionally sailed at Malpas in early December and the return at Keepit in March. The drought of 2019 forced both heats onto Malpas, with Keepit sailors driving three hours each way to compete — a measure of what the fixture means.

The modern era has been shaped by Andrew Landenberger, a Grafton product who lives at nearby Ben Lomond, close to the dam. He teamed with Mitch Booth for Tornado silver at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics — the country's strongest Olympic sailing result since 1972 — and later won the Classic Division at the 2019 A Class Catamaran Worlds in England, winning the final seven races to claim the title by 12 points, before turning his hand to design through Landenberger OneDesign. He now serves as Commodore, racing at Malpas alongside the membership.

With the annual regatta firmly established, the little club at the top of the tablelands keeps punching along.