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Sailing club

Melbourne has no shortage of bayside clubs, but sailing in the middle of a bushland park with kangaroos watching from the rigging lawn is a different proposition entirely. Lysterfield Sailing Club is a small off-the-beach club for dinghies and catamarans on Lysterfield Lake, a retired drinking-water reservoir in the city's outer south-east, roughly 32 kilometres from the CBD. Members describe sharing their rigging time with the local kangaroos, and that single detail captures the club's character better than any facilities list: this is sailing in the bush, on enclosed freshwater, half an hour from suburbia. The club pitches itself as genuinely welcoming — every ability, gender, background, religion and age is explicitly invited — and it pays respect to the Wurundjeri people, the land's traditional owners. Membership is deliberately affordable: in the 2025/26 season an adult or a whole family joins for $180, and visitors can front a winter race for ten dollars a boat. Any monohull dinghy up to sixteen feet and catamarans up to 14.5 feet fit within the club's racing scope. Racing happens weekly on Saturdays through the October-to-May summer series and every second Saturday across

Sailing club

Mackay Sailing Club runs its sport from two very different front yards. The dinghy section, billed as Off The Beach, launches from the sand at Shoal Point on Mackay's Northern Beaches, while the yacht section operates out of Mackay Harbour, from where crews head out to island anchorages and offshore race starts. The club pitches itself to everyone from veteran keelboat sailors to juniors heading out in their first Sabot and those who simply love a quiet day on the water — and its program list backs that spread, running from Learn to Sail through Race Training and Club Racing to Adventure Sailing. The incorporated club, reachable by post at PO Box 8821, Mount Pleasant, maintains an active online presence and invites prospective members to come and meet the sailors on the beach during dinghy days. Its signature fixture is the annual Mackay Festival of Sails: published results survive from the 2021 edition, and a 2026 running has already been flagged for April on the club's calendar. That 2021 festival drew Lasers, Laser Radials and Laser 4.7s in the monohull divisions, Arrows, Taipan 4.9 catamarans and foiling Moths among the multihulls, and Optimists, Sabots and Open Skiffs in the

Sailing club

Mackay Yacht Club occupies one of the more enviable clubrooms on the central Queensland coast: a clubhouse on Breakwater Access Road at the marina's southern end, at Mackay Harbour, looking out over the same water where its race finish lines have been drawn. The club appears as Mackay Yacht Club Inc on Yachting Australia's affiliated-club listings for Queensland, yet its present-day profile is an unusual one. Its long-standing website, listed by the Queensland Cruising Yacht Club among reciprocal clubs, refused connection at the time of research, suggesting the club's web presence may have lapsed, and no current office bearers, membership figures or active social channels could be verified. What the record does show, clearly, is a club that punched well above its weight in offshore racing administration. Mackay Yacht Club co-conducted the 530-nautical-mile Southport to Mackay ocean race alongside the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia and Southport Yacht Club, an event described in 2004 by CYCA's Offshore magazine as the longest race on the east Australian coast at that time. It also co-organised the annual Yeppoon to Mackay Ocean Yacht Race with the Capricornia Cruising Yacht Club,

Sailing club

Mixed in Nelly Bay, QLD.

Sailing club

Scale is the first thing to grasp about the Mandurah Offshore Fishing and Sailing Club. With a membership around the 2,500 mark, it has been described by one marine industry directory as the largest club of its kind in the country, and even its more conservative 2021 figures — 973 full boating members plus 730 associate and social members — dwarf most Australian sailing organisations. The club describes itself as the leading water-based activities club in the Peel Region, and given that its Facebook following alone tops 4,200, few would argue. The dual identity in the name is genuine. This is simultaneously a serious sailing club, with dinghy fleets from Optimists through to 29ers and keelboat racing across three divisions, and a serious fishing club whose volunteers once dropped cameras to the seafloor to help Recfishwest site the Mandurah artificial reef. Power boating gets its own organised program of competitive time trials and social events, and a club boat is available so members can get out fishing. The modern clubhouse at 115 Breakwater Parade, inside the Mandurah Ocean Marina, doubles as a functions venue capable of hosting around 400 guests across its reception spaces.

Sailing club

When Australian Sailing's Club in Focus series profiled Manly 16ft Skiff Sailing Club in 2019, it called the club one of Australia's great skiff clubs. The numbers behind that judgement are striking. Around 300 active sailors race here through the summer months, backed by a social membership that grew so fast the cap had to be lifted repeatedly, from 800 in 1988 to 6,000 by 2004, with 4,502 members on the books by May 2005. The licensed clubhouse on East Esplanade, with its bar, bistro and function rooms, funds the sailing, and the sailing justifies the clubhouse. At the centre of everything is the 16ft skiff, a class that began at Balmain on Sydney Harbour in 1901 and has been raced at Manly since the mid-1920s. The club deliberately supports just four classes — Manly Juniors, Flying Elevens, 13ft skiffs and the sixteens themselves — arranged as a single ladder from first sail to the senior fleet, and it credits much of its success to that restraint. Racing runs every Saturday from the first weekend of September to Easter, and the club's signature fixture is the Port Jackson Championship, which it has hosted since 1957–58, taking the sixteens onto the main harbour near the Bridge

Sailing club

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Sailing club

Dinghy in Manly, QLD.

Sailing club

Sailing club on North Harbour within walking distance of Manly centre; operates a drop-off facility only (no berths or moorings), with twilight racing in summer and Sunday racing year-round.

Sailing club

At the very end of Grace Street, where the Mannering Park peninsula runs out into the southern reaches of Lake Macquarie, sits a clubhouse built by its own members and still maintained by them. That tells you most of what you need to know about Mannering Park Amateur Sailing Club: a small, self-reliant community club in a town where, as the club's own history puts it, several generations of local families have been involved with the sailing club at one time or another. The town itself was once called Vales Point, and the club grew up alongside the power station and coal mine that drew new families to the lake. The sailing here is genuinely mixed. Saturday racing draws trailer sailers and small fixed-keel yachts, catamarans (added to the fleet in the 2002–03 season) and dinghies, while Wednesday evenings in season bring a twilight race that has become something of a local institution — residents gather along the lake edge to watch the fleet sail past, a weekly ritual the club credits with helping identify Mannering Park with sailing. For a club of its size, the results sheet is striking: the club records members who have won State and National titles and represented it at regattas

Sailing club

"We have whole families racing and call ourselves 'the family club'" — that is how Manning River Sailing Club describes itself, and the record bears it out. Based on the river at Taree, this is a multi-generational dinghy club whose roots run back through the VJ and Sabot eras, and whose alumni include an Olympic bronze medallist and national champions produced from a small Mid North Coast town. Ian Ruff, who won bronze in the 470 class at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, learnt his sailing on the Manning River in the VJ "Heroic"; club champion John Muscio collected junior state, senior state and Australian VJ titles across three consecutive seasons in the early 1980s. One clarification matters for visitors: Taree is home to two intertwined sailing bodies. The Manning River Vee-Ess Sailing Club, formed in 1946, became the licensed Taree Aquatic Club at the foot of Macquarie Street, while the VJ and Sabot clubs that amalgamated in 1979 became today's Manning River Sailing Club on William Wynter Drive. They are separate organisations — the Aquatic Club's own risk manual notes that junior sail training for the area is carried out by Manning River Sailing Club. The clubhouse doubles as a

Sailing club

Dinghy/Multihull in Margaret River, WA.

Sailing club

Windsurfing is not a sideline at Marmong Point Sailing Club — it is the whole show. By the club's own description, it is the only windsurfing-only club in New South Wales with its own clubhouse, rescue boat and facilities, a distinction earned the hard way. Established back in 1936 as a Lake Macquarie skiff club, it absorbed the windsurfing boom of the 1980s, watched its skiff sailors drift away through the 1990s, and let the board sailors take the helm. They have been running it ever since. The result is one of the more distinctive sailing identities on the lake. While most Lake Macquarie clubs chase conventional dinghy and keelboat fleets, Marmong Point anchors the New South Wales windsurfing calendar, racing all year round — including through the colder months, when its Mid-Winter Regatta gives the state scene a fixture few other venues would attempt. A Spring Regatta and a 4 Seasons Series round out the annual program, and members contest state-wide windsurfing championships through the summer. The club sits between Booragul and Eleebana on the lake's western shore, roughly eighteen kilometres south-west of Newcastle, beside the small Marmong Point Marina. Its reach extends b

Sailing club

Getting to Maroochy Sailing Club requires a short walk — there is no other way in. The clubhouse sits on Chambers Island in the Maroochy River, reached by a pedestrian-only footbridge from Bradman Avenue in Maroochydore, and the club reckons that absence of road frontage makes it unique. Volunteer-run and family-oriented, it sails under the motto Friendship through Sailing, and the club estimates around 2,000 people have held membership across its lifetime. Formed in 1959, this is the original organised sailing body on the Maroochy River and appears on Yachting Australia's affiliated-club listings as Maroochy Sailing Club Inc, Maroochydore. It is sometimes written up as Maroochydore Sailing Club — an Optimist sailor was listed under exactly that name at the 2024 Zhik Youth Sail Queensland — but it should not be confused with the Mooloolaba Yacht Club, which runs keelboat and offshore racing on the coast, nor with any other Sunshine Coast body. Commodore Norm Richards heads the 2025–26 committee, with Steve Cook as Rear Commodore (Sailing), Gärd Saunders as Secretary and David Thomson as Treasurer. The club carries Australian Sailing Discover Sailing Training Centre certification,

Sailing club

Sailing Club in Maroochydore, QLD.

Sailing club

Some clubs take their name from the water they sail; this one carries the name of a city roughly thirty kilometres from its launching beach. Maryborough Sailing Club is a volunteer-run, family-oriented dinghy club whose racing has unfolded on Hervey Bay, off the sand at Scarness, since 1929 by its own account. The title is less a map reference than a historical souvenir, kept from an era when the regional city gave the club its identity even though the sailing happened down the coast. Affiliated with Australian Sailing, the club keeps a deliberately modest footprint: a stretch of beach, a fleet of small boats and a calendar built around families learning and racing together. Club Marine's trailerboat guide to the region pairs it with the neighbouring Hervey Bay Sailing Club, describing the two as the hubs for trailable dinghies and catamarans along the strip between Scarness and Torquay. Continuity is the striking theme. The club's Easter regatta reached its 84th edition in 2015, a run few sporting bodies in Queensland can match, and the organisation has outlived its own clubhouse: after flooding in early 2022 the ageing building was demolished, yet the sailing never stopped. For v

Sailing club

Every junior sailing club has a workhorse training boat, but very few can claim one of their own invention. Maylands Yacht Club is the home of the Mudlark, a junior class designed and built by Wally Gaunt — foundation commodore, driving force behind the club's postwar clubhouse and father of longtime Club Patron Terry Gaunt Snr. That single lineage captures the flavour of the place: a small, self-reliant river club where members have always made what they needed, from boats to buildings. The club's own tagline declares it the sailing club "at the top of the river", and the geography is no small part of its charm. Perched on the Swan River foreshore at Maylands, it sits less than five kilometres from the Perth CBD yet roughly twenty-five kilometres upriver from Fremantle — a fresh-feeling, tree-lined stretch of water far removed from the big-fleet scene downstream. The clubhouse itself is heritage-listed on the State Heritage Office inHerit database, recognition of more than a century of organised sailing from this shoreline. Competitive sailing here reaches back to 1913-14, when the original Maylands Sailing Club began racing from the old East Street jetty, and the formally const

Sailing club

Speed is written into McCrae Yacht Club's DNA. This is the Mornington Peninsula club that hosted four challenges for the Little America's Cup, that produced the world sailing speed record holder Yellow Pages Endeavour, and whose members were aboard the first sailing vessel ever to sustain more than fifty knots. Yet walk the hard on a Saturday in season and the scene is less exotic than that pedigree suggests: an off-the-beach club for dinghies and catamarans on the southern shore of Port Phillip, with no marina pens or keelboat moorings, where around 600 members put fleets of seventy or more boats on the water each weekend. The scale sits comfortably alongside the family brief set at the founding in 1961 — the club's stated objective was to encourage sailing in all its forms in a way that involved the whole family, with gender and age expressly irrelevant. That principle shows up in the membership model: every member shares a duty-roster obligation, and more than a thousand duty slots are filled across a season, so the racing machine genuinely runs on its own people. The clubhouse on Point Nepean Road fronts a broad sandy beach between Rosebud and Dromana, with a lawn and deck ove

Sailing club

Sailing Club in Kew, VIC.

Sailing club

Ask a Melbourne Trailable Yacht Club member where the clubhouse is and the honest answer is: wherever the boats happen to be. MTYC is a family-orientated club for trailer-sailer sailors, with no fixed home of its own — its fleet lives on trailers, its racing happens on Port Phillip and its members are drawn from across Melbourne, around Victoria and even interstate. Boats in the fleet range from four to eight metres, taking in everything from compact weekender-style pocket cruisers to quick sports-style trailer yachts. The club's welcoming posture is practical rather than rhetorical. Boat ownership is not required to belong, and the club is plain about why: social activities fill the calendar and crew are always in demand. For anyone weighing up a first trailer yacht — or simply wanting regular sailing without the cost of a boat — that crewing culture is the real product. A skipper gets willing hands; a newcomer gets sea time, tuition by osmosis and a front-row education in how these versatile little yachts are rigged, launched and raced. Competition is organised around four series across the year — Summer, Winter, Twilight and a dedicated Women's Sailing Series — with handicap s

Sailing club

Dinghy in Attadale, WA.

Sailing club

Yacht Club (mixed) in Meningie, SA.

Sailing club

Mixed in Merimbula, NSW.

Sailing club

Some clubs announce themselves with a marina full of masts; Merricks Yacht Club announces itself with a tractor on a sandy beach. Tucked at the end of Merricks Beach Road on the eastern shore of Western Port, facing across the water toward Phillip Island, this is a small club centred on off-the-beach dinghy and catamaran sailing in a holiday township — the kind of place where sailing, fishing and socialising share the same stretch of foreshore and the same cast of characters. The sailing itself is described by locals as friendly but competitive, and the club has produced its share of capable, successful sailors across the decades — a return out of all proportion to its modest scale. Racing runs on Saturdays from November through April, and the current class list is remarkably broad for a club this size: Melges 14s, Lasers, 470s, Sabres, Impulses, Pacers, Optimists, A-Class catamarans, Mosquitoes, Castle 650s and Explorer 16s all appear on the water. The club is also the holder of the Westernport Challenge trophies for off-the-beach yachts — silverware it notes, with evident relish, it has won "again." What rounds out the picture is the social fabric. Social members are welcome, t