Sailing club
Sussex Inlet & Basin Yacht Club
About
Sussex Inlet & Basin Yacht Club at a glance
Most yacht clubs are anchored to a building. Sussex Inlet & Basin Yacht Club is anchored to a stretch of water instead — the club states plainly that the waters of St Georges Basin are its clubhouse, because it has no fixed clubhouse on the shore. It is a trailer-sailer club in the purest form: around a dozen or so boats, their owners towing in from across the Shoalhaven and beyond, rigging at public ramps and racing the big shallow lagoon that spreads behind the Sussex Inlet township on the NSW South Coast. The club bills itself as the Basin's home of social sailing and racing, and the order of those words matters. Racing here is genuinely competitive — a full handicap system, divisional results, an annual regatta that draws entries from Sydney, the Illawarra and Port Kembla — but it is run inside a deliberately social frame. Membership is open to anyone with an interest in sailing, whether actively or simply as a supporter, and visitors can sample up to six races as guests before anyone raises the subject of joining. The centrepiece of the year is the annual Regatta on the first weekend of February, which has pulled visiting crews from all over NSW and further afield for more t
Service area: Sussex Inlet, NSW
- Club type
- Keelboat
- Australian Sailing
- Affiliated · 2025-26
- Primary classes
- Keelboat
- Kids learn to sail
- Available
About Sussex Inlet & Basin Yacht Club
Most yacht clubs are anchored to a building. Sussex Inlet & Basin Yacht Club is anchored to a stretch of water instead — the club states plainly that the waters of St Georges Basin are its clubhouse, because it has no fixed clubhouse on the shore. It is a trailer-sailer club in the purest form: around a dozen or so boats, their owners towing in from across the Shoalhaven and beyond, rigging at public ramps and racing the big shallow lagoon that spreads behind the Sussex Inlet township on the NSW South Coast. The club bills itself as the Basin's home of social sailing and racing, and the order of those words matters. Racing here is genuinely competitive — a full handicap system, divisional results, an annual regatta that draws entries from Sydney, the Illawarra and Port Kembla — but it is run inside a deliberately social frame. Membership is open to anyone with an interest in sailing, whether actively or simply as a supporter, and visitors can sample up to six races as guests before anyone raises the subject of joining. The centrepiece of the year is the annual Regatta on the first weekend of February, which has pulled visiting crews from all over NSW and further afield for more than three decades. Shoreside, the Sussex Inlet RSL provides the venue and the staff, and the regatta reports read like a village comedy — volunteers credited by nickname, a band called Sons of Beaches on the bill, a grand buffet laid on by one of the competing crews. For sailors who like their racing honest and their socials unpretentious, this small club on the Basin has been quietly getting the balance right since 1987.
Training and sailing programs
There is no learn-to-sail school here, and the club does not pretend otherwise. No Tackers program, junior pathway or Discover Sailing Centre accreditation exists on the public record — with a fleet of around a dozen trailer-sailers and no clubhouse, the club simply is not built for formal instruction. What it offers instead is something rarer: a low-pressure doorway into keelboat and trailer-sailer racing for adults who already have a boat, or access to one. The mechanics are welcoming by design. The racing is handicap-based, and the system is built to absorb newcomers: boats without an established Performance Based Handicap are simply allocated a Class Based Handicap and slotted into the fleet, with handicaps arranged by email before the day. Visitors may sail up to six races as guests under Australian Sailing's SailPass system, with each crew member completing a SailPass per race — enough of a season to know whether the Basin habit is going to stick before committing to membership. The season runs on Saturdays from November to May, and the fleet's trailer-sailer character keeps everything flexible: boats are towed in, launched, raced and taken home, so the club carries none of the overheads that sink small volunteer organisations. Learning here happens the way it always has in small keelboat fleets — crewing spots for the willing, local knowledge passed across the cockpit about shallows, marks and the quirks of the lagoon. The annual regatta doubles as the club's development program of sorts, because racing shoulder to shoulder with visiting boats from the Illawarra Yacht Club, Port Kembla, Cronulla and Sydney clubs is the fastest education a trailer-sailer crew can get.
Sailing waters
St Georges Basin is a broad, shallow coastal lagoon behind the Sussex Inlet township in the Shoalhaven region of the NSW South Coast — big enough to run real courses, sheltered enough to keep trailer-sailers comfortable, and connected to the sea through the narrow inlet channel. It is one of the South Coast's major recreational boating and fishing waterways, and it carries no speed restrictions for powerboats, so racing crews share the lagoon with skiers, anglers and holiday pontoons and learn to keep their eyes open. Because the club owns no waterfront real estate, the Basin's public ramps are its infrastructure. Nielson Lane offers the closest access to the main basin; Lions Park has the largest facility with a double slipway; Basin View provides a two-lane concrete ramp with a jetty; the Riverside ramp at South Sussex and the Chris Creek ramp at Jacob Ellmoos Reserve cover the other corners, with further ramps over at Swan Lake. Swan Lake, five minutes west of the township, is promoted locally as the area's best year-round recreational sailing spot. The practical centre of gravity is the Sussex Inlet township, a classic South Coast holiday community built around camping, fishing, cruising, hire boats and waterfront pontoons. The regatta runs ashore from the Sussex Inlet RSL, which supplies the venue and the staff — an arrangement that suits a club whose identity lives on the water rather than in a building. Sailing on a shallow lagoon rewards a particular skill set: reading pressure lines across open shallows, watching for the bottom on leeward legs, and keeping clear of the weekend armada. There are no published claims about prevailing winds or tides here, and locals will tell you the Basin makes its own mind up. What it reliably provides is room — acres of sheltered water with a pub meal waiting at the end of the day.
Club history
Sailing on St Georges Basin is older than the current club by nearly a century. The first recorded sailing club on the waterway was the St Vincent Sailing Club, established in 1898, and the club's own website preserves extracts from the Shoalhaven Telegraph of that era covering early local sailing — evidence of a community racing on this lagoon while Federation was still being negotiated. Sussex Inlet & Basin Yacht Club itself was founded in 1987, the third known sailing club on the Basin and today the only survivor. The names of its founders and first office bearers have not made it into the public record, which fits a club that has never been much interested in ceremony. What the record does show is continuity: the club has sailed every single year since 1987. The annual regatta has grown into the institution that carries the club's name beyond the lagoon. The 30th Annual Regatta was celebrated in 2020, and by the 2025 running the club's report was counting 35 years and counting. The first weekend of February is now a fixture that draws trailer-sailers and small keelboats from across NSW — recent results sheets show winners from the Illawarra Yacht Club, Port Kembla Sailing Club, Cronulla and the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia sphere, with divisions settled under both performance and class-based handicapping. Boats like Outlook, Magella, Hooroo and The Builders House have taken the silverware in recent years, with Hooroo flying the home club's colours. The regatta's culture says everything about the club's character. Volunteers are immortalised in the reports under nicknames — Lynne Arnold billed as The Dragon, Greg Arnold as GA — while someone gets crowned Wind Whisperer for the day, a spectator craft goes down in the record as a floating gin palace, the crew of the boat Backchat lays on a grand buffet, and a band trading as Sons of Beaches provides the entertainment. It is competitive sailing wrapped in a weekend party, and it has kept a small, clubhouse-free club healthy for close to four decades. The third club on the Basin looks built to last.