Narrabeen Lakes Sailing Club fire
by Jonny Harrison 2 Dec 2021 02:03 PST
NLSC (Narrabeen Lakes Sailing Club) is a 115 year old sailing club located on the Northern Beaches of Sydney. We are a small dinghy sailing club with a strong family and junior sailing focus.
Primarily sailing in Sabots, Optimists, Herons, Lasers and windsurfers. We have many former national champions and are very proud of our youth sailing scheme.
On Saturday night (27 Nov) at 5pm we were informed of a fire in the building which is adjacent to our clubhouse. The fire quickly spread through their building and into our clubhouse. Fire services were on scene quickly, but took several hours to extinguish the blaze which ripped through the club destroying all of our boats, equipment and assets. We had our committee and safety boats in the club, along with our fleet of 12 junior boats and our club training boats. We also had around 12 members boats stored in the club. All of the boats have been destroyed in the fire, along with our equipment (marks, spares, lifejackets etc).
At this stage we aren't allowed access into the building as it is structurally unsound and police and fire are still investigating the scene.
Whilst we are insured, we all know that insurance money doesn't cover the thousands of volunteer hours that have gone into making the club what it is today. This money may replace some boats, but won't allow us to operate for the next 1-2 years whilst the council (who owned our club house) arrange for it to be rebuilt. We are keen to get our members back on the water as soon as we can and as such have set up a Go Fund Me page to raise money so we can rent storage space, cover costs and keep our club intact until we can reestablish our facilities.
Donate via gofund.me/56e7b258