Sailing club
Palm Beach Sailing Club
About
Palm Beach Sailing Club at a glance
Catamarans rule the beach at Sand Point. Palm Beach Sailing Club is Pittwater's dedicated off-the-beach multihull club, a place where Hobie 16s — the class with more than 113,000 boats built worldwide — share the sand with Taipans, Nacras, Formula 18s, A-Class cats and Wetas. Windsurfers race with the fleet, dinghies are made welcome, and everything is scored on yardstick so a mixed mob of boats can compete meaningfully on the same course. It is an emphatically unpretentious outfit. The membership skews towards ordinary Sydney suburbs rather than the Palm Beach postcode, runs from kids through to sailors in their seventies, and splits roughly evenly between men and women. Yet the same club that teaches an absolute beginner on a Sunday morning has also produced a staggering honour roll: Olympic gold medallist David Forbes, bronze medallists Chris Cairns, Mitch Booth and John Forbes, and Rio 2016 silver medallists Jason Waterhouse and Lisa Darmanin all raced here. Pittwater Online News has claimed no other waterway in Australia has produced as many internationally renowned sailors, and the club's world title holders — among them Rod and Kerry Waterhouse, Ian Bashford, Martin Cross an
Service area: Palm Beach, NSW
- Club type
- Multihull
- Australian Sailing
- Affiliated · 2025-26
- Primary classes
- Multihull
- Kids learn to sail
- Available
About Palm Beach Sailing Club
Catamarans rule the beach at Sand Point. Palm Beach Sailing Club is Pittwater's dedicated off-the-beach multihull club, a place where Hobie 16s — the class with more than 113,000 boats built worldwide — share the sand with Taipans, Nacras, Formula 18s, A-Class cats and Wetas. Windsurfers race with the fleet, dinghies are made welcome, and everything is scored on yardstick so a mixed mob of boats can compete meaningfully on the same course. It is an emphatically unpretentious outfit. The membership skews towards ordinary Sydney suburbs rather than the Palm Beach postcode, runs from kids through to sailors in their seventies, and splits roughly evenly between men and women. Yet the same club that teaches an absolute beginner on a Sunday morning has also produced a staggering honour roll: Olympic gold medallist David Forbes, bronze medallists Chris Cairns, Mitch Booth and John Forbes, and Rio 2016 silver medallists Jason Waterhouse and Lisa Darmanin all raced here. Pittwater Online News has claimed no other waterway in Australia has produced as many internationally renowned sailors, and the club's world title holders — among them Rod and Kerry Waterhouse, Ian Bashford, Martin Cross and Susan Miller-Duchatel — give the argument weight. The club's own motto is equally direct: "If you can sail here, you can sail anywhere." Saturdays follow a comfortable rhythm of racing, then a barbecue back at the clubhouse, with traditions like the season-ending Patonga Fish and Chip Run and the Princess Race stitched into the calendar. For anyone on the Northern Beaches who wants to sail cats seriously — or simply learn without fuss — this is the natural home.
Training and sailing programs
The standout offering is hands-on catamaran tuition for adults: learn-to-sail sessions run most Sundays in season as four-hour classes from ten until two, taught on a Hobie 18 with a preferred class size of just two students — four is possible — and priced at fifty dollars a day. The syllabus is thoroughly practical: launching off the beach and retrieving the boat, steering and sail trim, tacks, gybes, person-overboard recovery, reading wind and water, and, for those ready, an introduction to the trapeze. Instruction comes from Scott Kesteven, a Dinghy Instructor qualified through Australian Sailing, who brings more than fifty years of sailing experience to the beach. Children from eight years and young teenagers can join in, provided a parent or guardian enrols alongside them — a family-first arrangement that suits the club's character. Beyond the formal course, learning here is deeply social. Saturday-morning sailing schools have run periodically, teaching everything from basic knot-tying through to advanced racing technique, and experienced members informally mentor newcomers on rigging, tuning, crew work and tactics. A common entry route is simply to crew for a seasoned skipper and absorb the craft race by race. Each season opens with an Open Day known as the Heart Starter, when visitors can hop aboard a catamaran and feel what multihull speed is like; the 2018 edition even drew the Deputy Mayor. The club is not an accredited Discover Sailing Centre and does not run the Tackers junior program — instruction remains deliberately member-led and informal. For sailors who progress into racing, the Saturday-afternoon club championship and pointscore series provide the competitive ladder, and the depth of talent on the beach means coaching by osmosis happens whether you seek it or not.
Sailing waters
The clubhouse sits at 1 Iluka Road, Palm Beach, on Sand Point — the locals also know it as Sandy Beach — on the western foreshore of Pittwater, just around the corner from Barrenjoey Headland and diagonally opposite the end of Snapperman Lane. Boats rig on the beach and the grassy verge reached via Sand Point Lane, with trailer parking beside Iluka Park; the club holds a limited allocation of season passes, with some free parking behind the western car park. It is an unassuming setup, but the sailing arena it opens onto is anything but. Pittwater is a broad, protected estuary ringed by national park, and the summer nor-east sea breeze funnels in reliably across the racing area, which for the big regatta sprawls from Governor Phillip Park across to West Head, The Basin and Careel Bay. What makes this stretch of water famous, though, is its treachery. Where the sea breeze bends around Barrenjoey Headland and its sand spit, it spawns "bullets" — fluky, violent gusts that bounce down the headland and arrive without warning, more than capable of pitching an unwary catamaran straight over. Generations of sailors have learned respect here the wet way, and the hazard is celebrated rather than cursed: the club's signature regatta takes its name from those very gusts. The season runs from a late-August Heart Starter through to May, pausing over Christmas, with racing on Saturday afternoons. Between races the backdrop does its own quiet work — dolphins, turtles and sea eagles are commonly spotted from the trampolines. It is, by any measure, one of Sydney's great natural sailing amphitheatres, and the club's belief that competence earned here travels anywhere is easy to understand after one gusty afternoon.
Club history
The club traces its beginnings to 1949, when it was founded as the Palm Beach Catamaran Club, sailing chiefly off the southern end of Sandy Beach. An earlier profile put the start a year later, in 1950, with a fleet of small monohulls and "the odd catamaran" — the club's own telling prefers 1949, and either way the multihull thread was present from the outset. The second great strand of the story began in 1962, when the Pittwater Catamaran Club was established, sailing strictly for catamarans of all types off Sandy Beach near Sand Point Lane. That club became a genuine production line of State, National, World and Olympic champions, and it marked a half-century of multihull sailing off the beach in 2012. Around 1999–2000 the two clubs merged, and today's Palm Beach Sailing Club carries both lineages. The competitive record is remarkable for a beach club. David Forbes won Star class gold at the 1972 Munich Olympics and a Star world title in 1971; Chris Cairns took Tornado bronze in Los Angeles in 1984; Mitch Booth and John Forbes collected bronze in Barcelona in 1992, Booth adding silver in 1996 and Forbes silver at Sydney 2000; Jason Waterhouse and Lisa Darmanin won silver in Rio in 2016. Member Upu Kila received an MBE recognising his sailing achievements in Papua New Guinea. The annual Beware the Bullets Regatta, held on November's third weekend, has run consecutively for over half a century — 2018 was its 53rd edition — and in the 1970s and 1980s it drew more than two hundred catamarans to Governor Phillip Park. The 2018 running incorporated the NSW Taipan State Titles, and the 2025 edition saw John Forbes sailing with daughter Bronte alongside Nacra 15 sailors bound for the Youth Worlds. The name, fittingly, honours Barrenjoey's notorious gusts.