About
Soldiers Point Sailing Club at a glance
A naming note first, because Soldiers Point has three sailing identities and this is only one of them. The off-the-beach club on Seaview Crescent, facing Salamander Bay, sailed for decades under the name Port Stephens Sailing and Aquatic Club — PSSAC to locals — before Newcastle Cruising Yacht Club took up the licence to run it and gave the venue its new name, The Bay Sailing Centre. It is not the Port Stephens Yacht Club, the neighbouring keelboat club beside Soldiers Point Marina, and it is not Corlette Point Sailing Club, the club that founded Sail Port Stephens, though all three cooperate closely. What this club does, specifically, is dinghy, skiff, catamaran and sailboard sailing: launching off a long white beach, racing on Sundays, teaching children and hosting championships. That championship resume is striking for a community venue. PSSAC ran the 2016–17 Australian Tasar Nationals and the 2018 RS Aero Australian Championship, the latter so well received that competitors declared Port Stephens "the best venue" and the event was framed as a rehearsal for a world championship bid. Under NCYC management the centre has kept its elite calendar — it now stages the Off-the-Beach B
Service area: Soldiers Point, NSW
- Club type
- Sailing Club
- Australian Sailing
- Not listed as affiliated
- Primary classes
- Sailing Club
- Kids learn to sail
- Available
About Soldiers Point Sailing Club
A naming note first, because Soldiers Point has three sailing identities and this is only one of them. The off-the-beach club on Seaview Crescent, facing Salamander Bay, sailed for decades under the name Port Stephens Sailing and Aquatic Club — PSSAC to locals — before Newcastle Cruising Yacht Club took up the licence to run it and gave the venue its new name, The Bay Sailing Centre. It is not the Port Stephens Yacht Club, the neighbouring keelboat club beside Soldiers Point Marina, and it is not Corlette Point Sailing Club, the club that founded Sail Port Stephens, though all three cooperate closely. What this club does, specifically, is dinghy, skiff, catamaran and sailboard sailing: launching off a long white beach, racing on Sundays, teaching children and hosting championships. That championship resume is striking for a community venue. PSSAC ran the 2016–17 Australian Tasar Nationals and the 2018 RS Aero Australian Championship, the latter so well received that competitors declared Port Stephens "the best venue" and the event was framed as a rehearsal for a world championship bid. Under NCYC management the centre has kept its elite calendar — it now stages the Off-the-Beach Bay Series within Sail Port Stephens — while leaning hard into grassroots growth. A junior expansion pushed membership past 100, with around 80 per cent of new members being families, and a café serving barista coffee from seven in the morning gives the waterfront a public face. The result is a venue with a genuinely dual personality: national-championship race track on Saturday, nippers' sailing school on Sunday.
Training and sailing programs
The junior gateway here is unusually welcoming. Children can come and sail three times before anyone asks them to join, and the entry product is the Tackers Intro — a three-hour instructor-guided session that gives a complete beginner a taste of dinghy sailing in controlled, shallow-water conditions. From there, holiday and term-based learn-to-sail programs build fundamental skills in a safe, supportive setting, with the NCYC Sailing Academy supplying O'Pen Skiffs and Tackers dinghies, the modern plastic trainer boats that forgive capsizes and shrug off beach landings. The formula works: in one documented year, 70 children completed the club's basic skills course, and most entrants in the Sail Port Stephens Junior Regatta were lining up for the first regatta of their lives. Graduates feed straight into club racing. Sunday is race day from September through April, with point-score competition through the summer season in Lasers and O'Pen Skiffs — a deliberately simple two-class structure that keeps costs down and fleets tight for teenagers and adults alike. The development pathway is regional rather than insular: the centre works with Corlette Point Sailing Club, Port Stephens Yacht Club and Newcastle Cruising Yacht Club on a shared youth program, so a junior who outgrows Salamander Bay's Sunday fleets has clear routes into bigger regattas, keelboat sailing and the wider Sail Port Stephens scene. Professional staffing and resourcing arrived with NCYC's takeover, lifting sail training from volunteer-best-efforts to an academy operation while keeping the community-club feel. Adults returning to sailing can slot into the same Sunday structure, and the beach-launch format means no one needs a mooring, a trailer park membership or anything more complicated than a boat and a lifejacket.
Sailing waters
Salamander Bay sits on the southern shore of Port Stephens, about 80 nautical miles north of Sydney Heads, and the club faces east across it toward the harbour headlands. Port Stephens itself is a formidable sheet of water — larger in area than Sydney Harbour, entered through a wide, deep, navigable gap between the Tomaree and Yacaaba headlands, and home to a resident population of bottlenose dolphins. The centre's own assessment rates it among Australia's finest sailboat racing tracks: fluctuating tides add a tactical wrinkle, yet race officers can still lay fair courses for any wind direction or distance, passage races included. The daily rhythm is a sea-breeze pattern that dinghy sailors dream about. Mornings tend to start light — ideal for learn-to-sail sessions — before the north-easter builds through the afternoon, delivering the 15-to-20-knot days that thrilled the 2018 RS Aero nationals fleet. Ashore, the site is purpose-made for beach sailing: a long stretch of white sand with grassy reserves flanking the clubhouse for rigging and launching dinghies, skiffs, catamarans and sailboards, plus a public wharf and concrete ramp a hundred metres north. Trailer sailers and sports boats use the nearby Soldiers Point boat ramp and can overnight at the adjoining Soldiers Point Marina, a five-star facility sheltered from the prevailing summer nor'easters. The clubhouse keeps an upstairs viewing deck and veranda for following the racing and gathering afterwards, and the café below opens from 7am to noon. For regatta visitors, everything — beach, ramp, marina, coffee — sits within a few hundred metres.
Club history
The venue's documented story runs to roughly 40 years, which places its origins in the early 1980s, though the precise founding year of the Port Stephens Sailing and Aquatic Club is not recorded in available sources. What is clear is that PSSAC grew into one of regional NSW's most capable championship hosts. The 2016–17 Australian Tasar Nationals brought registration, measurement and the social program to the club over the New Year, and in December 2018 the RS Aero Australian Championship arrived with professional race officer Denis Thompson running four days of racing. Competitors' verdict — "the best venue" — encouraged plans to bring the RS Aero World Championship to Port Stephens the following year, though the 2019–20 worlds ultimately went to Black Rock Yacht Club in Melbourne. The club's junior era deserves its own chapter: a learn-to-sail push in the years around 2012 saw 70 children through the basic skills course in a single year and membership climb past 100, overwhelmingly families, with regional backing from Corlette Point, Port Stephens Yacht Club and NCYC. The decisive change came when Newcastle Cruising Yacht Club attained the licence to operate the community club, rebranding it The Bay Sailing Centre and installing professional staffing across sailing and training while broadening public access. The centre now contributes the Off-the-Beach Bay Series to Sail Port Stephens, the regatta launched in 2008 with 25 boats by Corlette Point Sailing Association and since grown under NCYC and Destination Port Stephens management. Meanwhile the older neighbour keeps its own course: Port Stephens Yacht Club started life in 1971 flying the name Port Stephens Yacht Squadron, its orange burgee carrying a black cannon in honour of the 1820 Soldiers Point garrison, and adopted its present name in 2003. The two clubs, dinghy and keelboat, share the point in easy coexistence.