Sailing club
Paradise Point Sailing Club
About
Paradise Point Sailing Club at a glance
On the northern Gold Coast, where the Broadwater meets the foreshore at Paradise Point, a small community sailing club has quietly built one of the more complete junior sailing programs in South East Queensland. Paradise Point Sailing Club, based at Esplanade South Park on The Esplanade, describes itself in directory listings as a small club of enthusiasts spanning all ages, with every class welcome — and the program sheet backs that up. From six-year-olds taking their first cautious tack through to under-18 racers competing in Open Fleet divisions, the club's waterside base on the Broadwater hums with activity across juniors, youth and adults alike. The club's public face has sharpened considerably in recent years. Around October 2025 it relaunched its website with expanded program information, laying out a structured pathway of junior learn-to-sail, youth racing, school holiday camps and an all-ages open program, alongside club racing on the first and third Sundays of each month. Its signature event, the Mid Winter Cup junior and youth regatta, draws young sailors in Optimists, Sabots, Open Skiffs and ILCA 4s to the Broadwater each June, with the 2026 Invitational edition schedu
Service area: Paradise Point, QLD
- Club type
- Dinghy
- Australian Sailing
- Affiliated · 2025-26
- Primary classes
- Dinghy
- Kids learn to sail
- Available
About Paradise Point Sailing Club
On the northern Gold Coast, where the Broadwater meets the foreshore at Paradise Point, a small community sailing club has quietly built one of the more complete junior sailing programs in South East Queensland. Paradise Point Sailing Club, based at Esplanade South Park on The Esplanade, describes itself in directory listings as a small club of enthusiasts spanning all ages, with every class welcome — and the program sheet backs that up. From six-year-olds taking their first cautious tack through to under-18 racers competing in Open Fleet divisions, the club's waterside base on the Broadwater hums with activity across juniors, youth and adults alike. The club's public face has sharpened considerably in recent years. Around October 2025 it relaunched its website with expanded program information, laying out a structured pathway of junior learn-to-sail, youth racing, school holiday camps and an all-ages open program, alongside club racing on the first and third Sundays of each month. Its signature event, the Mid Winter Cup junior and youth regatta, draws young sailors in Optimists, Sabots, Open Skiffs and ILCA 4s to the Broadwater each June, with the 2026 Invitational edition scheduled for 27–28 June and entries set at $100 per boat. President John Murphy, reachable on the club's published phone number, fronts an organisation that wears its community ethos openly. Club materials position PPSC as a club "for everyone, young and young-at-heart", with an emphasis on qualified instructors and safety — safety boats accompany the open club racing, and the learn-to-sail curriculum is designed, in the club's words, to equip students with the skills and knowledge needed to sail a small dinghy safely and competently in moderate conditions. For a Broadwater suburb better known for parkrun and pelicans, Paradise Point's sailing club punches well above its weight.
Training and sailing programs
The standout offering at Paradise Point is the breadth of its junior and youth pathway, which extends well beyond the standard introductory ladder. The Junior Sailing Program takes children from age six and works through rigging, tacking and gybing, and capsize recovery — the essential toolkit for confident small-boat sailing. From there, sailors graduate into the Youth Sailing and Racing Program for ten-to-eighteen-year-olds, which runs both Green Fleet training and dedicated Youth Racing sessions, giving developing sailors a coached bridge between learning the basics and front-line competition. School Holiday Sailing Camps, offered in one-day and two-day formats for ages six to sixteen, provide an intensive entry point for families testing the water. Adults and mixed-age beginners are not left out. The Open Sailing Program welcomes learners of any age across a four-session course covering rigging, tacking and gybing, and sailing theory, with the option to sail solo or in pairs. Everything funnels towards participation: club racing open to junior, youth and adult sailors runs on the first and third Sundays of each month, welcomes every dinghy class, and is patrolled by safety boats — a low-pressure race environment well suited to sailors fresh out of training. The program architecture peaks with the Mid Winter Cup, the club's junior and youth regatta sailed on the Broadwater alongside the clubhouse. Eligible classes include the ILCA 4, Open Skiff, Optimist and Sabot in both single-handed and two-up configurations, split into Open and Green Fleet divisions for sailors aged from six to under eighteen. Entry for the 2026 Invitational, set down for 27–28 June, is $100 per boat, and limited vessel storage is available at the clubhouse for visiting regatta entrants. The club's supporter list, displayed on its materials, includes Dynamic Electrical and Communications and the PSA Sailing Online Shop — local backing for what is, by any measure, a thoughtfully constructed pathway from first sail to regatta racing.
Sailing waters
The club's home is Esplanade South Park, at 25 The Esplanade, Paradise Point — a waterfront reserve in one of the northern Gold Coast's most relaxed Broadwater-front suburbs. Step off the rigging area and you are effectively on the sailing course: the club races and trains on the Gold Coast Broadwater immediately alongside its clubhouse, which means no towing, no transit and no lost sailing time. For junior programs especially, that immediacy is gold; young sailors can rig on the park's edge and be on the water within minutes, all in full view of the shore. The Broadwater itself is one of South East Queensland's great small-boat venues. This broad, sheltered stretch of water behind the northern Gold Coast's island fringe offers protected sailing in most conditions, with enough open water for proper courses and enough shelter to keep learn-to-sail sessions manageable in moderate weather — precisely the conditions the club's training curriculum is designed around. The Mid Winter Cup regatta is sailed on this same water alongside the clubhouse, so visiting sailors get a true home-water test in a venue the host club knows intimately. Paradise Point's setting gives the club an identity distinct from the surf-and-tourism image of the Gold Coast further south. This is the calm side of the city: a foreshore suburb of the City of Gold Coast where the water is flat, the parkland runs to the water's edge, and a community sailing club can operate at a human scale. The club's own branding leans into the locality, featuring a bridge-and-sail motif that nods to the Sovereign Islands and Paradise Point bridge nearby. Contact is straightforward — phone 0407 145 397 or email ppscinc@bigpond.com — and the club maintains a Facebook presence for updates. For families on the northern Gold Coast looking for accessible, sheltered-water dinghy sailing, the combination of park-side clubhouse and Broadwater playground is difficult to fault.
Club history
Unlike many clubs in this directory, Paradise Point Sailing Club does not have a publicly documented founding date — no anniversary celebrations, commemorative plaques or historical summaries have surfaced in the sources consulted, and the club itself publishes no retrospective account of its early years. What can be established is a documented record of training accreditation and program growth stretching back at least a decade, and it is from that record that the club's story must be told. The earliest firm marker comes from a directory entry added in March 2014, which described Paradise Point as an accredited Yachting Australia training facility. That listing tells us two things: the club was operating a recognised sail-training operation by the early 2010s, and its identity was already bound up with teaching rather than purely with racing. The same entry records the club's own summary of its aims — to equip students with the skills and knowledge to handle a small dinghy safely and competently in moderate weather — a training philosophy that remains visible in the program structure the club publishes today. The more recent chapter is one of consolidation and expansion. Around October 2025 the club launched a rebuilt website carrying greatly expanded program information, and the offering it documents is that of a mature training organisation: a junior program from age six, a youth racing stream with Green Fleet and racing divisions, holiday camps, an all-ages open learn-to-sail course, and fortnightly club racing for every dinghy class. The Mid Winter Cup junior and youth regatta, sailed on the Broadwater beside the clubhouse, has grown into a fixture with defined class divisions — Optimist, Sabot, Open Skiff and ILCA 4 — and an Invitational edition scheduled for late June 2026 under president John Murphy. Where the deeper chronology is silent, the shape of the club's development can still be read between the lines: an accredited training presence by 2014, a steadily widening program ladder, a modernised public face in 2025, and a regatta that now anchors the junior sailing calendar on the northern Broadwater. Until a fuller club history emerges, that documented trail of programs and events stands as the best available account of how Paradise Point Sailing Club came to be the organisation it is today.