Members of Corrimal and Port Kembla surf clubs have spoken of their heartbreak at being “locked out” of the surf life saving movement.
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Surf Life Saving NSW declared the dissenting clubs deregistered on Friday after their leaders refused to renew service agreements mandating unpopular Saturday patrols.
The decision affects an estimated 400 nippers and hundreds of adult members, many with decades of personal involvement and generational ties to the clubs.
As the weight of the decision hit, they let their feelings be known in letters of protest.
"When I read your email this afternoon my heart broke," wrote 34-year-old Corrimal club member Craig Hyslop, in an email to SLSNSW president Tony Haven. "The movement that I have poured my heart into for the majority of my life had done something I never thought it would. Today Mr. Haven you told volunteers they were no longer needed. Today you locked our family out of our home."
Corrimal club president Tony Cartwright is consulting a Sydney law firm, Colin Biggers and Paisley, in the hope of finding a legal avenue for restoring the clubs' memberships.
"Option number one has always been for us to stay a member of surf life saving - we've been a member for 104 years and we want to continue," he told the Mercury.
"If there's not a legal basis for them getting rid of us, if they've treated us unfairly, then we want to explore that.
"Option two is to open up with another parent body."
The clubs have been in contact with a private not-for-profit group, Manly-based Surf Educators International.
The group, fronted by former ironman champion Craig Riddington, runs surf skills courses for schools, individuals and corporates in Australia, West Africa, Europe, Japan and the UAE.
How the organisation could parent a surf club, with fully-insured nippers programs and volunteers accredited to take up the clubs' preferred patrolling roster, on Sundays and public holidays, is yet to be determined.
"This has never happened before, this is ground-breaking stuff," Mr Cartwright said.
No one can say whether new arrangements will be in place in time for the start of the nippers' season, in mid-October.
"We're asking the [parents] to hold off and are expecting there to be an opportunity to re-sign," Mr Cartwright said.
"If mums and dads aren't happy, they're free to transfer."
Patrols at Corrimal and Port Kembla beaches were covered by lifeguards in the absence of volunteers on Sunday.
The clubs' representatives strongly oppose Saturday patrols, which supplement patrols already covered by council’s paid lifeguards. They say their limited ranks of volunteers spend the patrols sitting idle because lifeguards have the job in hand.
At last-minute negotiations with SLSNSW on Tuesday, the clubs agreed to sign on to Saturday patrols this year, provided the requirement was written out of the agreement for 2016 and 2017, and replaced with on-call arrangements. But SLSNSW refused to guarantee the shift.
In an open letter titled Your club is not my club, Corrimal club member Ben Malcolm challenged SLSNSW's claim to have spent 18 months consulting on the agreement, which he likened to "a dictatorship".
"You say it's only three members required to patrol four hours a day for 'just' five Saturdays. Well, I'm a seven-day shift worker who gets one full weekend off every six weeks," he said.
"What Corrimal SLSC means to me is something you will never understand. We are a small club, we are best mates, we are family. We are united. We are, and always will be, a club that you will not dissolve."
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