Sailing club
Manly 16ft Skiff Sailing ClubManly, NSWWhen Australian Sailing's Club in Focus series profiled Manly 16ft Skiff Sailing Club in 2019, it called the club one of Australia's great skiff clubs. The numbers behind that judgement are striking. Around 300 active sailors race here through the summer months, backed by a social membership that grew so fast the cap had to be lifted repeatedly, from 800 in 1988 to 6,000 by 2004, with 4,502 members on the books by May 2005. The licensed clubhouse on East Esplanade, with its bar, bistro and function rooms, funds the sailing, and the sailing justifies the clubhouse. At the centre of everything is the 16ft skiff, a class that began at Balmain on Sydney Harbour in 1901 and has been raced at Manly since the mid-1920s. The club deliberately supports just four classes — Manly Juniors, Flying Elevens, 13ft skiffs and the sixteens themselves — arranged as a single ladder from first sail to the senior fleet, and it credits much of its success to that restraint. Racing runs every Saturday from the first weekend of September to Easter, and the club's signature fixture is the Port Jackson Championship, which it has hosted since 1957–58, taking the sixteens onto the main harbour near the Bridge
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