Royal Geelong Yacht Club can lay claim to a couple of firsts in its 153-year history.
Despite the club’s sheltered location on the edge of Corio Bay, a committee in 1906 organised Australia’s first ocean race.
Words: GREG WANE
Fast forward to 1974 and two junior members of the now-Royal Geelong Yacht Club blitzed an international field of cadet dinghy sailors in Portugal to win the club’s first world title.
Royal Geelong Yacht Club is one of the oldest sailing clubs in Australia.
Formed in 1859 after a series of meetings in the city’s pubs, Geelong Yacht Club held its first regatta on Corio Bay in February of that year.
The total prize purse was 243 pounds, or $486 in today’s money. As a comparison, a modest house in Geelong cost about 55 pounds in the 1850s.
The club is credited with giving birth to ocean racing in Australia.
In the first decade of the 20th Century yachting regattas were confined to races around the buoys in quieter waters of Port Phillip Bay, Hobart’s Derwent Estuary, Perth’s Swan River and Sydney Harbour.
In 1906 American yachting editor Thomas Fleming Day contacted his old friend and Geelong Yacht Club commodore Tom Dickson, offering a handsome trophy as an incentive to organiser an amateur ocean race.
Dickson accepted the challenge and brought together a committee to organise a race from Port Phillip Heads to Low Head in Tasmania.
The race was set for Boxing Day 1907 and would be timed to start just inside Port Phillip Heads at slack water to allow yachts to safely negotiate the notorious Rip into Bass Strait.
