About
Mounts Bay Sailing Club at a glance
Sailing club at Crawley on Mounts Bay near the Perth CBD offering clubhouse, pen and dinghy facilities and regular dinghy and keelboat racing.
Service area: Perth Metro
- Club type
- Dinghy
- Australian Sailing
- Affiliated · 2025-26
- Primary classes
- Dinghy
- Kids learn to sail
- Available
About Mounts Bay Sailing Club
Four years before the Commonwealth of Australia came into being, a group of Perth sailors founded a club that is still racing today. Mounts Bay Sailing Club began in 1897, in an era before restricted-class sailing, with a straightforward aim: making competitive sailing in popular craft accessible, affordable and exciting. Members affectionately call it "The Bay", and the summer of 2022 marked its 125th sailing season — a span that makes it, by any measure, one of Perth's oldest surviving sailing institutions. Longevity alone would be noteworthy, but The Bay's claim on attention is what it has done with those years. In 1905 it pioneered interstate competition, sending a boat and crew to a championship all the way over on Sydney Harbour — the first club anywhere to do so; two years later its 18-footer Aeolus became the first Western Australian yacht to win an Australian Championship. In 1960-61 member Basil Eugene Wright commissioned six Cherubs and thereby established Australia's very first Cherub fleet — his son Gordon promptly won the class's first national title. More recently the club hosted the Moth World Championship in December 2019, drawing entries from Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand and the host nation, and it is scheduled to host the Moth Worlds again in 2026. The modern club, on the Swan River at Crawley, counts around 350 members — 150 of them ordinary members, the remaining 200 spread across social, junior and intermediate categories, with women making up forty per cent of the roll — and states its mission simply: bringing people together "on and off the water". It is an accredited Discover Sailing Centre, a regular host of national and international regattas, and, by its own account, the occupant of a setting among Perth's most spectacular places to sail. The roll of notable names — Richard Court, foiling-Moth pioneer John Ilett, Kevin Owens OM, Jack Cassidy, Luke Parkinson, Ash Gabrielson — reads like a cross-section of Australian sailing itself.
Training and sailing programs
Mounts Bay runs the full arc of sail training, and it starts young: junior learn-to-sail programs starting from age six, plus courses for adults, all taught by qualified instructors through school-holiday programs and weekly classes across the season. As an accredited Australian Sailing Discover Sailing Centre, the club delivers the national curriculum, but what distinguishes its offering is what sits around the edges of it. Learn to Windsurf courses keep a board-sailing tradition alive that many dinghy clubs have lost, and school sailing programs channel students from across Perth onto Matilda Bay during term time. The philosophy has a name at this club: Learning and Development. Rather than treating courses as a conveyor belt that ends with a certificate, The Bay frames training as an ongoing craft, giving members the chance to hone their skills alongside some of Perth's leading sailors. Given the membership roll — which includes the man who founded foiling Moth technology and multiple national champions — that is no hollow promise. A junior graduating from an O'pen Skiff or Optimist at Crawley is quite literally sharing the water with sailors who have won world titles in the Moth class. The breadth of classes raced at the club reinforces the pathway. Beyond the junior trainers, fleets span Flying Ant, GP14, Sharpie, Tasar, Moth, keelboats, Windfoiler and Windsurfer LT, so a developing sailor always has a next step and a fleet to grow into. Friday-evening twilight sailing and club-wide racing every Sunday in season supply the competitive rhythm, and the Member's Bar — open Fridays from five and Sundays from noon to six — ensures the debrief is taken as seriously as the start. For a sailor starting at six years old and dreaming of a Moth Worlds start line, there may be no better-connected nursery in the country.
Sailing waters
Matilda Bay at Crawley, on Perth's Swan River, provides the stage, and the club itself calls it one of the most spectacular places to sail in the city. The claim is easy to credit: a wide, open reach of river cupped by the university foreshore, with the city skyline downstream and room enough for championship fleets. When the Moth World Championship came here in December 2019, sailors from six nations raced on this stretch of water, and the class will return for the 2026 Worlds — an endorsement few river venues worldwide can match. The weekly pattern revolves around two fixtures. Twilight sailing on Friday evenings eases members into the weekend, while club-wide racing runs every Sunday through the season across the club's many classes. The Member's Bar keeps pace, opening from 5pm on Fridays and from midday to 6pm on Sundays to coincide with the biggest sailing days. Ashore, the clubhouse doubles as a widely known Perth venue for weddings, conferences and large events — the river outlook doing much of the decorating. Facilities on the water have been built piece by piece by members themselves. The club's thirty-pen jetty, erected in 1979 through volunteer effort, loans from members and commitments from pen lessees, added a cruising dimension to what had been an off-the-beach racing club; the pens were doubled in 1994. Today's sailing calendar remains busy at every level: club racing each Sunday, state titles such as the 2025/26 Sharpie States, and the "Three of a Kind" regatta alongside the 2026 Moth Worlds. Between the sheltered river, the pen facility and the deep regatta tradition, Matilda Bay serves equally the six-year-old in a training Optimist and the international foiling fleet skimming past the same foreshore.
Club history
The founders of 1897 wanted competitive sailing within reach of ordinary people, and for the club's first four decades "home" was wherever members could find it: boats stored in boatsheds along the Perth foreshore, meetings convened at venues scattered around the city. A dedicated clubhouse only arrived in 1939 — and was promptly requisitioned for the war effort, when the United States Navy used it for its Catalina flying boat operations on Matilda Bay. The present clubhouse rose in the late 1950s and early 1960s, built substantially by volunteer labour, and the jetty of 1979 and its 1994 expansion followed the same members-build-it tradition. The racing milestones came earlier and faster. The interstate expedition of 1905 — the first by any club — signalled unusual ambition for a young organisation, and Aeolus's 1907 national crown, the first Australian Championship won by a WA yacht, confirmed it. Half a century later Basil Eugene Wright's commissioned six-pack of Cherubs created the class's first Australian fleet, and Gordon Wright's victory in the inaugural Cherub Nationals kept the silverware at home. Into the modern era, The Bay has become synonymous with the Moth. Member John Ilett founded the foiling technology that transformed the class into the airborne spectacle it is today, and the club hosted the Moth World Championship in December 2019 before securing the 2026 edition as well. Through all of it, membership has held a distinctive shape — about 350 strong as of 2022, with forty per cent female participation — and the mission has stayed close to the founders' original brief of accessibility. One hundred and twenty-five summers after those first races, the club that once stored its boats in other people's sheds stands as a custodian of Australian sailing's memory, still building, still racing, still opening its bar on Fridays at five.