Ord River Sailing Club

About Ord River Sailing Club

Ord River Sailing Club is a dinghy sailing club that sails on Lake Argyle and the adjoining Lake Kununurra in the East Kimberley. The club represents a remote, community‑based sailing organisation rather than a metropolitan yacht club: its activities are rooted in inland freshwater sailing and a tradition of Tasar dinghy racing that began on the lake in the 1980s.

The club’s recent revival has combined local enthusiasm with formal affiliation and community events, positioning it to grow membership and develop learn‑to‑sail opportunities for both juniors and adults.

The club operates with a close connection to local community groups and relies on volunteer support and regional servicing assistance to sustain on‑water opportunities in this remote area.

Training and sailing programs

The defining program at Ord River Sailing Club is also its newest. The club's inaugural Discover Sailing Day, held on Sunday 10 May 2026, drew fifty-six participants from the Kununurra community — an extraordinary opening statement for a club only weeks away from formal affiliation. Australian Sailing's WA office reported the event warmly, stating that it looked forward to supporting the organisation as it builds membership and delivers on-water opportunities locally, with assistance flowing through the WA Government's Regional Servicing Grant program.

That grant context matters: remote clubs face costs and logistics that metropolitan centres rarely encounter, and external servicing support is often what turns enthusiasm into a sustainable calendar. Beyond the come-and-try day, the club's documented program history centres on racing rather than instruction. From about 1984 the Tasar two-person dinghy was the fleet of choice, and competition connected Kununurra sailors with interstate rivals from the Northern Territory.

Structured learn-to-sail offerings in the club's earlier decades are not recorded in the public material available, which is unsurprising for a small volunteer group operating far from any capital city; clubs of this size typically grow skills informally, pairing newcomers with experienced hands before formal courses become viable. With national affiliation now secured and a successful first participation event on the books, the pathway that Australian Sailing describes — activation, membership growth and community sailing opportunity — points toward junior and adult introductory courses becoming part of the club's future.

For the moment, the honest summary is that training here is young, energetic and backed by both the state association and the regional grant system.

Club history

Piecing together the story of Ord River Sailing Club means working from fragments, because no founding date or founder names appear in the public sources consulted. The honest account begins with what can be verified. Peter Saunders, who served as Kununurra's District Veterinary Officer from 1973, sat on the committees that ran the club during its early community years, placing organised sailing activity in the town by the late 1970s or thereabouts.

The Tasar class association records that racing in its two-person dinghy began on Lake Argyle around 1984, and the local fleet grew quickly enough to mingle with sailors from Darwin. In 1986 the lake hosted the first WA Tasar State Championships — won, fittingly for the cross-border flavour of the fleet, by Darwin's Andrew York sailing Vamoose. The club surfaces again in official records in May 1998, when it received a $640 Sport Lottery Fund country package grant toward travel costs for the state titles, with Sport and Recreation Minister Norman Moore acknowledging the sheer distance members covered to compete.

That same year the club appeared among the respondent groups in the Federal Court native title matter Ward v Western Australia, a reminder that East Kimberley institutions operate inside a wider story of land and community. Corporate records show the incorporated body active from 1 July 2009. The most recent chapter is the brightest: a first Discover Sailing Day in May 2026 that attracted fifty-six people, followed in June 2026 by Australian Sailing's announcement that the club had joined the national affiliated network with twenty-two members.

The founding generation may be unrecorded, but the revival is thoroughly documented.