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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2013-06-18 Daily Xml
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PORT ADELAIDE AND PORT RIVER SAILING CLUBS

Dr CLOSE (Port Adelaide) (15:34): I rise today to speak about the wonderful Port Adelaide Sailing Club and the Port River Sailing Club. Just this weekend, the former held its presentation night, which was, as usual, a lot of fun as well as playing a serious role in celebrating the achievements of the club and its membership over the season. The Port River Sailing Club did the same a few weekends ago. These clubs have welcomed me as their new MP and have made me feel part of them and, for that, I am very grateful.

These two clubs are not large and they are not very wealthy. Their membership is largely, although not exclusively, drawn from the area of the Lefevre Peninsula in Port Adelaide. While not pretending to be an expert in boats and boating, I can inform the house that the major distinguishing feature between the two clubs is that the boats are brought to the Port River club for sailing, while the boats reside at the marina for the Port Adelaide club.

They are neighbouring clubs and, indeed, their membership overlaps considerably. The Port River club uses the Port Adelaide clubrooms for big events and there is evidently a great deal of comradeship between the two. What I love about these clubs is their absolute commitment to their communities. They have a great time out on the water, but they are both utterly committed to getting as wide a group as possible out there with them.

In the case of the Port Adelaide Sailing Club, they host Sailability SA (about which I have had occasion to speak in this place previously), which allows sailors with various disabilities to sail for fun and competitively. Several months ago, on an almost impossibly hot weekend, they held the state championships, and I was delighted to be part of events over that weekend, culminating in a very lively presentation ceremony.

It was terrific to see several of those sailors at the presentation night on Saturday, with many of them winning trophies, including the wonderful Ben Walter winning my inaugural youth trophy for the Port Adelaide Sailing Club. Ben is a lovely young man whose sailing performance is fast eclipsing that of his father Shane as he accumulates trophies. Demonstrating how the two clubs are intertwined, his grandfather, Dennis Walter, is the patron of the Port River Sailing Club and is a true gentleman who has given an enormous amount of energy, wisdom and time to both clubs, as well as to the wider community.

The patron of the Port Adelaide Sailing Club, Mr Colin Adams, just celebrated his 97th birthday and has lived and worked around the Lefevre Peninsula periodically all his life, during which, amongst other things, he was the principal of Largs Bay primary. His connections to our community run deep and in his gentle and polite way he can tell you anything you need to know about the place.

Both Port Adelaide and Port River sailing clubs actively encourage young people, and I have been fortunate to attend school championships hosted by the Port River Sailing Club. I was delighted several weeks ago to be able to award my youth trophy for the Port River Sailing Club to Luke Unnasch, a very promising young sailor.

It is difficult to capture the spirit of the presentation nights. It is probably not appropriate to capture the detail. The gentle mockery, the awarding of prizes for accidental removal of breakwater rocks in attempting to negotiate a boat out of the marina, the T-shirts celebrating the notorious humbleness of one boat's crew are things not readily translated into a parliamentary speech. But the overall warmth of the clubs, the effort they put in voluntarily to make them work and the care they take to make everyone feel included are exemplified at the presentation nights, and prompted me to pay tribute to them in this place.

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