Wallerawang Sailing Club

About Wallerawang Sailing Club

Few Australian sailing clubs can claim a clubhouse literally raised by a service club working bee, but Wallerawang Sailing Club can. Its home on the shore of Lake Wallace, on the western fall of the Blue Mountains near Lithgow, was built as a community project of the Lithgow Apex Club — the sort of origin story that tells you almost everything about the club's character. This is a small, informal, volunteer-run outfit serving one of the few inland sailing communities west of the Great Dividing Range, and it wears that identity lightly and proudly.

The sailing is deliberately low-key. Rather than a packed calendar of pointscore series and championship events, the club runs two ten-week blocks of informal racing timed to the spring and summer school terms, using a handicap system that lets catamarans, dinghies and even sailboards share the same course. Races are long, lazy affairs of around two hours — sailing as a Sunday ritual rather than a results obsession. The one fixed point on the calendar is the annual regatta on the second weekend of November, which draws the district's sailors together and features in Lithgow's annual events listings.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Wallerawang is its open-door philosophy. The club has no dedicated website and no formal learn-to-sail machinery; instead, it extends a standing invitation, published through the local tourism channels, for anyone of any age to come down to Lake Wallace on a Sunday and be taken sailing free of charge. For a regional town better known for its railway heritage and its coal-fired power station, that's a quietly generous contribution — a club that exists less to win trophies than to make sure the lake gets used.

Services and expertise

• Sailing club

Service area: Lake Wallace, Wallerawang (near Lithgow), New South Wales

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A closer look