Oak Flats Sailing Club

About Oak Flats Sailing Club

Oak Flats Sailing Club is a local sailing club based in Oak Flats, NSW. It appears to run organised sailing activities and member-focused club programs, preserving a long-standing sailing tradition in the Illawarra area.

It appears on Australian Sailing's 2026-27 affiliation update in Band 22. Public contact information is available via phone.

Training and sailing programs

Here is the Oak Flats difference in one number: fifteen. The club owns 15 Spiral dinghies that members can simply use, along with three motor boats, so nobody needs to own a boat to sail — a model most clubs talk about and few actually deliver. The Spiral, a 3.8-metre dinghy needing minimal rigging, is easy to set up and forgiving to learn in, and as an affiliate of the Spiral Association of Australia the club hosts its national and state titles every so often, with club members in the mix. Membership costs $100 a year for children and $150 for adults, boat access included, which makes this one of the cheapest entries into sailing anywhere in the state.

The weekly rhythm is equally accessible. Most Sundays a course is set with buoys from the clubhouse at Deakin Reserve, for either racing or training, and the 2025 season opened on Sunday 14 September from nine in the morning. The junior pathway runs on mentorship: the club has many junior members, and older sailors pass their knowledge down, with the shallow, protected bay making an ideal classroom for beginners.

Many of those juniors have gone on to advanced sailing courses in Sydney, continuing a tradition that reaches back to the era when the Manly Junior ranked as NSW's most popular training boat and VJs filled the bay. There is no accredited Tackers program here — the strength is the club fleet, the low fees and the unbroken chain of older hands teaching younger ones.

Club history

The club grew out of Depression-era neighbourliness. Oak Flats took shape from 1925 as a holiday estate drawing visitors for water sports, fishing and prawning, and residents built their houses brick by brick with neighbours pitching in — forming, as the club's anniversary account puts it, a community spirit that became the foundation of the sailing club. In 1949 that spirit formalised as the Illawarra South Yacht Club, with annual membership set at 21 shillings; Ken Christopher, later a life member, recalled starting out in a little dinghy before he, his father and others started the club.

A first clubhouse rose at Deakin Reserve in 1950, and the name Oak Flats Sailing Club arrived with the 1954–55 season.

The club's very first official race was actually sailed at Warrawong's Illawarra Yacht Club, the district's only older club, having started in 1945. From there the fleet grew to around a hundred boats at its peak, and a WIN Television news crew covered a club regatta in December 1967. The alumni list carries some weight: Alan Carwardine learned to sail on the lake at Oak Flats from the age of nine and won the VJ state championship at twelve against an 80-boat fleet alongside his brother Geoff, before going on to design catamarans.

The 75th anniversary in February 2025 brought the launch of Kevin Gillis's book "Oak Flats Sailing Club: 75 Years of Sailing History and Community Involvement", now held in the Wollongong, Shellharbour and Kiama libraries — a fitting archive for a club determined to sail on for the next quarter-century.