Queens Lake Sailing Club

About Queens Lake Sailing Club

Queens Lake Sailing Club appears to be a local sailing/yacht club based at Lakewood, NSW, offering organised sailing programs and member activities typical of a sailing club.

It appears on Australian Sailing's 2026-27 affiliation update in Band 21. Public contact information is available via phone.

Training and sailing programs

Saturday is the beating heart of Queens Lake's development pathway, and its signature offering is a "tri-sailing" program run alongside the junior sailing program every weekend. The format is deliberately low-friction: Saturday morning try-out sessions invite young and old to have a go, with boats and safety gear supplied by the club, so nobody needs to own so much as a lifejacket to get afloat. That access rests on a fleet of small boats the club has bought outright thanks to generous backing from local organisations and businesses — a point of pride, because it means beginners can learn properly before spending a dollar on their own gear.

The pathway does not stop at the first tack. Junior sailors Toby, Sid and Oscar are themselves training as instructors and have already helped deliver a schools taster day, creating a teach-the-teachers cycle that keeps skills inside the club. Community outreach runs wide: in January 2025 the club hosted thirty home-schooled students aged ten to fifteen from the Manning and Port Macquarie–Hastings areas, part of Education Revolutions' Young Hero's Adventure Quest program, for a sailing experience day.

On the racing side, three series structure the season — Spring Pointscore, Summer Pointscore and the Club Championship — contested across three divisions. Juniors race in Division 3, where, as race secretary Martina Holt explains, they build versatility by swapping boats and crew positions to suit the weather. It is a deliberately old-school apprenticeship: sail everything, in every position, in all conditions, and the skills will follow.

Club history

If Queens Lake Sailing Club has a founding story, it has not yet been written down. The club's public presence runs through its Facebook page rather than a formal website, and no published history records the year the first sailors gathered on the lake or who called the meeting. What is documented, and documented well, is the club's recent rise — a story that begins with a modest volunteer club on a Camden Haven lake and accelerates sharply in the 2020s.

The turning point has been a run of event-hosting success that would flatter a club ten times its size. In the 2025–26 season alone, Queens Lake welcomed the Taipan State Championships for catamarans, the Maricat National Championships and MG14 skiff events, prompting local coverage to call it a sought-after country regatta venue. Much of that momentum is credited to Commodore Dave Castleton, a local plumber whose sponsorship hunting and volunteer organising have underwritten the club's growth — including the purchase of its own training fleet with support from local sponsors.

Castleton's own sailing résumé gained a blue-water line when he crewed on Inner Circle in the 2025 Rolex Sydney Hobart, and the season closed with the club's annual presentation and awards afternoon on 20 June, where Castleton received the Commodore's Award and the club marked what local press called a banner year. The history that is written so far, then, is less about origins and more about arrival: a club that spent years as a quiet local fixture and has now stepped, on its own terms and by its own labour, onto the state and national stage.