Wallerawang Sailing Club

About Wallerawang Sailing Club

Wallerawang Sailing Club appears to be a local sailing club based in Wallerawang, NSW. The listing identifies it as a club offering organised sailing activities and member-focused sailing programs, but no website or details about facilities, launch ramps, or specific services are provided in the available record.

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

Training and sailing programs

Wallerawang's entire approach to getting people on the water can be summed up in one gesture: free sailing experiences, offered to absolutely anyone who turns up at Lake Wallace on a Sunday. There's no enrolment form, no age cut-off, no fee — the club's stated aim is simply to encourage people of all ages to sail, and it meets that aim by putting newcomers in boats with experienced members and letting the lake do the persuading. It's the most informal entry pathway imaginable, and for a small country club it makes perfect sense: every newcomer welcomed on a Sunday is a potential member, and every member was once a newcomer.

Formal accredited training programs such as Tackers or a Discover Sailing Centre aren't part of the picture here — instruction happens the old way, one crew to a boat, knowledge passed hand to hand. What the club does offer in structured form is its racing: two ten-week series of informal races, run through the spring and summer school terms, culminating in the November regatta on the month's second weekend. New sailors who catch the bug through a free Sunday experience can graduate straight into that program, learning race craft in the least intimidating environment available.

The racing itself is built for accessibility. The club scores its fleet using the VSC — the Victorian Sailing Committee handicap system — a flexible yardstick that can accommodate most catamarans, racing dinghies and sailboards in a single mixed fleet. Races typically run for about two hours, giving everyone from a solo dinghy sailor to a family on a cat a proper afternoon on the water. Sailboards are explicitly welcome alongside conventional boats, a nod to the days when boardsailing was a mainstay of inland club racing. For sailors in the Lithgow district, it's the complete package: turn up, sail, race if you want to, and do it all again next Sunday.

Club history

Wallerawang's documented story begins, fittingly, with the town rather than the club. The name derives from the Wiradjuri language, translated variously as "plenty of water" or "place near wood or water" — an apt christening for a town that would one day acquire a lake. Wallerawang boomed in 1869 when the railway arrived; until the railway over the mountains to Bathurst opened in 1876, travellers left the train at Wallerawang and continued west by Cobb & Co coach. The power station followed in 1957, and its cooling-water dam created the lake that made sailing possible.

No founding year for the club itself is published, though it is an affiliated Australian Sailing club and a longstanding fixture in Lithgow's community directories, with regular events listed in the town's annual calendar. The clearest surviving chapter of its history is the building of its clubhouse: a community service scheme run through the Lithgow Apex Club, for which Gordon Gorton — an Apex member from 1979 to 1987 — is named as the scheme's co-initiator and the leader of its construction project team. Gorton's contribution to the region was recognised with an OAM in the 2025 King's Birthday Honours, and the clubhouse project stands among the achievements cited.

That Apex-built clubhouse captures the essence of the club: a facility that exists because local people organised, fundraised and swung hammers. The club's rhythm has remained steady ever since — spring and summer racing series, the annual November regatta, and the standing Sunday invitation to the public. With the former power station site now being redeveloped around the lake, the club finds itself on the cusp of a new chapter, its little patch of foreshore poised to become the recreation edge of a much larger lakeside community. The boats, one suspects, will keep going out regardless.