MPYC celebrates 37 years on Lake Macquarie

by Helen Hopcroft on 27 Sep 2007 There’s a portrait of the young Queen on the wall behind the stage, a couple of Australian flags and a collection of sailing trophies waiting to be handed out. The sound system crackles and the microphone spits like a cat as the Commodore approaches. It’s the annual prize giving ceremony of the Mannering Park Yacht Club on Lake Macquarie, New South Wales.

By the end of the evening, drunken club members will spill out onto the suburban streets around the little hall in which the ceremony is being held. But because most of the club members live locally, it’s unlikely that anyone will complain. The working class ethic of not ‘dobbing’ runs deep around here.

Mannering Park is the kind of suburb where, apart from an expensive belt of waterfront properties, most people live in box shaped fibro houses and drive beaten up cars. Ever since property prices shot up, no one has felt entirely comfortable in the suburb’s tentative new status as a desirable locale.

It makes the old blokes itch with embarrassment. They self consciously shuffle the concrete gnomes and the tyre swans in their front garden, while next door a shiny suited real estate agent hammers yet another ‘sold’ sign into the ground.

Mannering Park Yacht Club was formed in 1969. While the rest of the world was dropping acid, trying to identify mescaline cactuses and squeezing into psychedelic flares, the small lakeside suburb was organising its first races on Lake Macquarie.

A motley collection of VJ’s, skiffs, sabots and catamarans took to the water. In the words of former commodore, Mike Lewicki, the original races involved ‘anything that could float.’

The first regatta was held on the 14th March 1969 and in May of that year fifteen people attended the first club meeting. Over the years the club grew as more and more people from the local community became involved and today several generations of Mannering Park families have been members. Several excellent sailors have represented the club in regattas in Australia and overseas winning State and National titles which is a great achievement for a small community.

In 1997 the club was incorporated and changed its name to Mannering Park Yacht Club to reflect the change in the type of boats that now race with the club, and in the 2002/2003 catamaran racing was introduced on Saturdays. The club also runs a well attended twilight race series on Wednesday afternoons during daylight savings.

Many of the original club members were tradespeople and the club has largely retained its working class roots. Every weekend concreters, electricians and ‘chippies’ take to the water for an afternoon of fierce competition. Then they retire to the club house, just a humble brick shed, in order to spend the evening dissecting the race and drinking cheap beer.

Pelicans flap past and kids play along the waterfront, the smell of burning sausages fills the air, and evening brings a sea breeze and a cloud of mosquitoes. People sit around watching the darkness fall. There’s something about racing a boat that leaves you bone tired, but full of a peculiar type of contentedness.

Over the years the club has seen Saturday fleet numbers rise and fall. This year the catamaran fleet is booming with one of the largest 14’ racing fleets in New South Wales. But for years the numbers of racing yachts has been declining until it was announced during the ceremony that an average of ‘7.2’ yachts competed in each weekend race of the previous season.

The decline in the number of racing keel boats has caused much hand wringing and soul searching at the club. All kinds of strategies were proposed to try and build fleet numbers. Racing divisions were combined; series were scored on alternate weekends so you could still miss a week’s racing and win a series; handicappers adopted an unofficial ‘everyone wins once’ rule.

Recruiting crew became a desperate and continual activity. Anyone who showed even the slightest interest in sailing was invited to try racing. After their first race skippers would sidle up to each other and hiss; ‘was s/he any good?’ If the answer was ‘yes’ then a full scale battle would begin to secure the services of the new crew member. The newcomer would be frogmarched back to the clubhouse, wined and dined (albeit on a slightly charred sausage sandwich), then subjected to the most blatant and incredible flattery.

Only the most dangerously inept were not wooed in this fashion.

Despite these ongoing problems, the small club had much to celebrate in the 2006/2007 racing season.

In October of last year the club organised the inaugural Rafferty’s ‘Heaven Can Wait’ 24 hour yacht race on Lake Macquarie. Over seventy boats participated and the money raised was donated to the NSW Cancer Council and the Coastguard. One of the fastest sports boats in Australia, ‘Vivace’, participated in the shorter ‘One Lap Dash’ which was held alongside the 24 hour race.

The decision to host a major event was a big one for the little club. Some members thought it was a rotten decision; it cost the club a lot to stage the event, facilities were limited, and giving the profits to charity meant that the club effectively did a lot of work for nothing.

Other members thought that hosting the race was a great thing to do. What other small club would have the chutzpah to tackle such a major event? Surely some things were more important than making a profit. And anyway, it was worth it just to see the Bethwaite 8 carbon fibre ‘Vivace’ hooting along at full steam.

The race had a personal element to it. Commodore Mike Lewicki’s son Shaun had decided to organise the race while he was stuck in a hospital bed receiving treatment for cancer. Bored out of his mind, the accomplished sailor was lying on his back looking at the chips in the paint on the ceiling above his bed.
‘That look’s just like a race course’ he thought to himself.

‘If you tacked at the first chip, it would be a run to the second chip, then a nice reach back up to the third…’ The Heaven can Wait 24 hour yacht race was born.

The 24 hour Heaven Can Wait race will be held again this October long weekend, 29th and 30th of September. See http://www.heavencanwait.com.au for more details.

Like many suburban clubs, MPYC has produced its share of exceptional sailors. It looks like current junior member, 12 year old Jason Kakato could be one of these. He went home with a stack of trophies from the annual prize giving ceremony, including wins in the NSW combined high school catamaran race series. Apparently the Hunter Institute of Sport are interested in working with him once he reaches the decrepit age of 13.


His ‘thank you’ speech upon receiving the awards brought the house down. ‘I’d like to thank my mother’ he began and the whole club cheered loudly. He was remarkably self possessed for his age, ’12 going on 18’ observed someone, and not at all spoilt.

It seemed hard to believe that such a little kid could beat seasoned adult racers. Club member Darcy Wilson noted that Jason went from being ‘an average sailor a couple of seasons back to being really hard to beat.’

Jason became very much the boy again when he momentarily became transfixed by the shiny gold trophy he had just been handed. He looked at it with a type of reverence and twisted it about so it sparkled in the light.

The club is currently trying to find a fast monohull for Jason to sail. They’re looking for a Laser or something similar. If anyone’s able to help, please contact the club.





















The club’s only regular female skipper, a well spoken lady called Jenny, won the award for best club member. She used to work as a wine sales rep and performed the minor miracle of getting the social c