About Queenscliff Lonsdale Yacht Club
Friday evening at King Street, and the deck above Swan Bay fills with members watching the sun drop over the water — a weekly institution that says as much about Queenscliff Lonsdale Yacht Club as any trophy cabinet. This is a family club with an unusually wide sailing remit: dinghies and catamarans on the bay's shallows, keelboats racing every Saturday out on Port Phillip, trailer sailers in the pens, and a couta boat fleet that keeps Queenscliff's fishing-boat heritage under sail. The club believes it is probably among the oldest sailing organisations in Victoria, with more than a century on the shores of Swan Bay behind it — a claim explored in its history below, where two founding dates both deserve their place.
Affiliated with Australian Sailing and sailing under the Q prefix, the club has ridden a recent wave of growth. Membership jumped dramatically after the Covid years, the club secretary reported in 2023, as young families moved into the district and discovered the sailing on their doorstep. The clubhouse, boatshed and grounds along King Street were put up by the founding members with help from their families and friends, and volunteer labour still keeps them up — the sort of place where working on the club is part of belonging to it.
Visitors should note the local geography of clubs: Queenscliff has two. Queenscliff Lonsdale is the older, Swan Bay-based racing club with dinghies, cats, keelboats and couta boats; its younger neighbour, Queenscliff Cruising Yacht Club on Sand Island, is a keelboat destination club founded in 1963. Between them they cover nearly every kind of sailing the lower bay offers, but QLYC is where the town's sailing story began — and where, on a still evening, the sunset over the bay closes the argument.
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Service area: Queenscliff, VIC
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