St Kilda Boat Club and Marina

About St Kilda Boat Club and Marina

Community boat club at 56 Fooks Terrace, St Kilda, offering affordable hard stands, marina berths, slipping facilities, a private boat ramp, secure car park and clubrooms with bar facilities.

Club history

St Kilda Boat Club began in 1964 as the St Kilda Boatowners' Association, formed by owners of small power boats prepared to negotiate what was then a very shallow mangrove channel out to Barker Inlet. The channel was deepened in the early years by members wielding picks and shovels, the first clubhouse was an old Nissen hut, and the present clubrooms at 56 Fooks Terrace opened in 1980; the Salisbury council later improved the channel substantially for users of its public ramp and the club alike.

A marina with berths for about fifty boats followed, and in 2023 the club added another twenty-four berths, some of them able to take boats over ten metres, its biggest single expansion. The club's pitch has never changed: affordable berthing, hard stands and slipping for ordinary boat owners in Adelaide's north, run by volunteers, with a bar and a social calendar rather than a commercial tariff sheet.

Today it caters to vessels drawing up to about 1.8 metres, and the tide still has to be watched on the way in and out, which keeps the fleet honest and mostly shallow-draft. Motorboat owners in particular value the private ramp and secure parking as an escape from the queues and opportunistic theft at the public facility next door. Kayakers are active members, but the club runs no dinghy sailing, for the simple reason that there is no beach.

In 2023 the marina expansion was the clearest sign of the club's rude health, adding modern floating pens for bigger boats while holding fees at levels that keep boating accessible to working families across the northern suburbs.