About Barwon Heads Sailing Association
River sailing has a flavour all its own, and the Barwon Heads Sailing Association has been distilling it on the Barwon River estuary since 1968. This small community association on the Bellarine Peninsula carries the jaunty tagline "beginner to Olympic gold!", and the claim behind it is a genuine breadth of membership: first-time sailors in club courses share the water with hardened estuary racers who have read this river for decades, and everyone in between.
The association's soul belongs to the Mirror dinghy. It was founded specifically to organise Mirror class and combined racing on the river, and the little red-sailed gaff-rigged boats shaped the club's early character — fleets of father-and-child crews were the norm in the founding years. The Mirror connection also produced the club's signature event, the Barwon Safari, an annual January expedition up-river towards Tait's Point in the Connewarre Lakes that has run since the mid-1960s in spirit and since 1973 with medallions for every finisher.
The Easter Sheepwash Race, commemorating a founder's hull being spiked by a ti-tree stake on an early Safari, adds a second fixture with genuine folklore behind it.
The association's history is unusually well told, written by founding member and first secretary Frank Steuart, whose garage housed the rescue boat and buoys through the years when the club had no home of its own. Today the club operates from converted space near the Ozone Road Jetty, offers Single Race Sail Passes for visiting sailors, and maintains moorings and a members' buy-and-sell page — small-club sailing, thoughtfully run.
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Service area: Barwon Heads, VIC
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