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The Sandspit Yacht Club (SYC) has marked a major milestone – 65 years on the water as one of Rodney’s best-loved boating hubs – with an anniversary celebration held on Saturday, November 15.
On a warm spring evening, around 200 people gathered for the occasion outdoors at the clubrooms including club members, friends and many from the surrounding Sandspit community.
Debbie Aldred, now in her fifth consecutive year as commodore, said the club’s enduring success had been driven by volunteers.
“It’s really all about the legacy of the volunteers. It’s pretty amazing – the sense of history and the amount of work that’s been done with very little money, to be quite honest,” she said.
“It’s all been very hard yakka from the volunteers over many years. If anything needs doing, people turn up with a hammer and toolbelt on.”
Founded in 1960 by a small group of boating enthusiasts, SYC began as a haul-out yard on the Matakana River estuary (haul-out is when a boat is taken out of the water for maintenance, inspection, cleaning or storage).
The goal was simple: to create a shared space for maintaining and launching boats into the sheltered waters of Kawau Bay.
By 1969, the club had relocated to its current site on the Sandspit Reserve, where members gradually developed new facilities, including a clubhouse and slipways.
However, over time SYC’s role expanded well beyond maintenance.
It became a meeting point for sailors, boaties and fishing enthusiasts, evolving into an active club with four divisions across sports fishing, sailing/racing and powerboats, as well as a strong youth sailing programme run out of the SYC facilities at Algies Bay.
“The club now has around 1000 members and is well placed for the next chapter,” Aldred said.
“We’re one of the few boating clubs in NZ that has income streams and financial stability. That’s thanks to huge volunteer help in the early days, smart executive committee decisions through the ages, and always while keeping our fees as low as possible.
“Our members contribute in whatever ways they can, often donating their skills or offering support through their businesses – help that is immensely valuable to us.”
She added, “Our primary thing is still the same, affordable haul-out for our members. That’s very, very important at our club.”
Aldred said the future looked bright for SYC despite it currently being one of the toughest periods it had faced, and with economic pressures and new and ongoing compliance demands.
The club is presently undertaking a $200,000 wharf-pile replacement project and is also fundraising for a $350,000 deck extension to secure a larger club space for the future.
