About
Manly Yacht Club at a glance
Sailing club on North Harbour within walking distance of Manly centre; operates a drop-off facility only (no berths or moorings), with twilight racing in summer and Sunday racing year-round.
Service area: Sydney Harbour
- Club type
- Yacht Club (mixed keelboat+dinghy)
- Australian Sailing
- Affiliated · 2025-26
- Primary classes
- Yacht Club (mixed keelboat+dinghy)
- Kids learn to sail
- Available
About Manly Yacht Club
Australian sailing has Manly Yacht Club to thank for one of its great training dinghies. The Manly Junior was designed by a club committee member and launched into North Harbour in 1959, and in the decades since, some 10,000 sailors have learned their skills in the little two-person boat — among them a generation of national and international champions. The club that created it remains true to that origin: a community club, in its own words "run for the benefit of the local community", and open to sailors of every age and ability. The clubhouse tells its own story. Manly Yacht Club occupies the heritage former Manly Baths building on East Esplanade, and members have waged what they describe as a long, hard battle to restore it — done, pointedly, without poker machine or restaurant income. That volunteer ethos runs through everything the club does, from working bees on the old baths to parents keeping the junior program affordable. There is a streak of independence here that goes back to the beginning, too: this is a club founded by sailors who broke away to make their own rules, and in its early years it was unafraid of a stoush, including a famous incident in which an oar was launched, spear-like, at a prominent local yachtsman who had abused a junior sailor. On the water the club spreads wide. Its classes have ranged from 14ft skiffs, Manly Juniors and Manly Graduates through to small yachts on handicap and a Multihull Division that dates from the late 1960s, and today the racing calendar centres on weekend club racing, a popular twilight series and the Manly Cup, the club's own Open Skiff regatta.
Training and sailing programs
The junior program's cleverest feature is its business model: Manly Yacht Club shares the job with a commercial partner. Manly Sailing, a sailing school operating from the clubhouse, takes beginners through Levels 1 and 2 — starting in Optimists and small-rig O'pen Skiffs before graduating to full rigs — and its graduates then step straight into the club's own Level 3 and 4 Racing Development Program, where the emphasis shifts from seamanship to race craft. Families get professional instruction at the front end and club racing culture at the back end, with no awkward handover in between. Accessibility is engineered in. The club owns its training fleet — O'pen Skiff Sports boats, Optimists and Flying Elevens — so junior members between 8 and 18 can sail at a low-cost entry point without owning a boat, whether they arrive as complete novices or experienced racers. A head coach manages a team of qualified instructors, with coaching for the racing fleets on Saturdays and Sundays across a season of about twenty weeks, and parent volunteering keeps program costs down. The juniors then test themselves in club races, local regattas and state events, with the club's own Manly Cup Open Skiff regatta giving them a home trophy to chase. This structure is the product of a deliberate rebuild. In 2015 the club made what it called a bold decision to overhaul junior sailing, investing heavily in twenty Open Skiffs, coaching more than 50 kids across three racing fleets and adding a 4.7 Laser rig for the youth sailors. It marked a return to first principles for the club that invented the Manly Junior: own the pathway, own the boats, and the sailors will come.
Sailing waters
Manly Cove, on North Harbour just inside Sydney Harbour's North Head side, has been the club's stage since its earliest days racing out of Little Manly. The clubhouse is a local landmark in its own right — the heritage former Manly Baths building on East Esplanade, taken over after the old baths were damaged beyond repair in the great 1974 storm, and restored since by volunteer labour. Manly 16ft Skiff Sailing Club stands immediately adjacent, and Treharne's Manly Boatshed nearby carries the lineage of Verrall's Boatshed, the shed from which Manly sailing was organised in 1922. The water here has a reputation, and the club's own history makes the claim plainly: "there are few places in the world as challenging for a sailor as the waters off Manly". The villains are the black nor'easters, wild and gusty sea breezes that arrive without warning on hot summer days through November and December, while September's spring westerlies can be extreme in their own right. Crews raised in these conditions tend to be unflappable elsewhere, and the world's best have come to test themselves: in the lead-up to Sydney 2000, Olympic-class sailors training in Tornados, Solings and 49ers worked these waters, getting to know an area that punishes complacency. The cove's exposure is the flip side of its beauty. On 25 May 1974 a south-easterly gale driving 70-mile-per-hour winds on top of 2.5-metre tides devastated Manly Cove — 23 of the 46 boats moored there were lost, the promenade was wrecked, the seawall breached and every East Esplanade boatshed flooded a metre or more. That catastrophe reshaped the foreshore and, indirectly, delivered the club its present home. Dinghy storage and a rigging deck serve the sailing, with launching straight into the cove.
Club history
Sailing at Manly predates the club by generations. A Sailing and Rowing Club was founded there in 1875, and the Manly Sailing Club took shape around September 1922, when Lach Simms gathered the district's young sailors at Verrall's Boatshed. Manly Yacht Club's own beginning was an act of rebellion: the skiff club's rules stopped anyone over 18 from racing 14-footers, so in 1949 Harry Pollard led a breakaway group of young sailors out of Little Manly. The new club was constituted on 28 February 1950 under the name Manly 14ft Skiff Club, with Bill Edgley and Pollard as first President and Commodore; the first race, sailed on Saturday 21 October, saw Reg Barron take the opening championship heat on Van-Too in a brisk south-easterly. Early boats were stored at Farrell's Boatshed; in the mid-1950s the club bought Stuart's Boatshed, an old blue shed on piers, for roughly £1,500, the £400 deposit raised within a day. Monthly summer dances paid off the debt and funded renovations, growing so popular that off-duty police were hired as bouncers and rock-and-roll bands played into the early hours. The defining creation came in September 1959, when committee member Ralph Tobias's Manly Junior was launched — its snub nose dictated by a boatshed ceiling just over 8.5 feet high, since dinghies were stored standing up, with kits sold for £80. Ian Perdriau, plucked from the crowd at the launch, reckons he was the first kid to race one. Alan Rann became the club's first Australian champion (14ft class), Pollard's re-rigged Rainbow seeded the Manly Graduate, and by decade's end the club counted 42 Juniors and 20 Graduates. The Manly Yacht Club name arrived in 1964–65 as members moved into small yachts, and catamarans brought a Multihull Division in 1968–69. After the 1974 storm, the club took over the ruined Manly Baths and began the volunteer restoration that continues today.