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Sailing club

Dinghy in Narromine, NSW.

Sailing club

Navy Sailing is the friendly, public-facing name under which the Royal Australian Naval Sailing Association invites ordinary Sydneysiders to learn the ropes at Rushcutters Bay. Behind the brand sits one of the harbour's more unusual clubs: a volunteer-run organisation operating from what it cheerfully describes as a heritage tin shed sitting on the water at Sir David Martin Reserve, with a mission it states plainly — to encourage sailing within the Navy, while warmly welcoming local non-service sailors as members. That dual character runs through everything. Membership categories span Naval Members from past and present service, through Service Members from the wider defence forces, to Sailing Members drawn from civilian life, plus Associate and Country categories and a free event-day SailPass that lets a curious newcomer crew a race before deciding anything. The atmosphere the club sells is casual and sociable rather than blazer-and-brass. Members gather at The Whaler Bar, grab a coffee at the Navy Bear Cafe on the harbour, and fill a calendar that mixes Friday twilight racing with trivia nights, comedy evenings and guest speakers. There is even a radio-controlled yacht group rac

Sailing club

Community sailing club on the Swan River at Nedlands with club marina pens, dinghy facilities and active junior, dinghy and keelboat sailing programs.

Sailing club

At 1,175 metres above sea level on the NSW Northern Tablelands, New England Sailing Club sails higher than anyone else in the country — at least according to the club itself, which styles its Loch Malpas home the "Highest Sailing Club in Australia". The altitude is more than a slogan. This is a small regional club where sailors pull on wetsuits to race in September, where the season calendar bends around a cold, elevated water supply dam, and where the fleet leans towards off-the-beach cats and dinghies alongside the newer wing foil and windsurfing craft rather than keelboats. The club describes its own atmosphere as fun and friendly, open to sailors of all levels, and it also answers to a second name — the New England Sailing and Aquatic Club — reflecting the mixed water-sport community that shares the dam. What lifts this modest outfit well beyond its weight is a genuine high-performance thread. The club's current Commodore is Andrew Landenberger, Olympic silver medallist in the Tornado catamaran class at Atlanta 1996, who lives nearby at Ben Lomond and sails regularly at Malpas. The club claims, in its own words, to be home to "multi-year olympic, world, national and state cham

Sailing club

Not every sailing organisation wants a clubhouse, a bar and a start tower. The Newcastle and Hunter Trailer Yacht Association — NHTYA to its members — is proudly built the other way: an incorporated association of people who are, in its own words, passionate about their trailer sailers, organised around boats that live on trailers and a clubroom that exists largely online. The membership mix tells the story of who this suits. Husband-and-wife crews, families and singlehanded sailors campaign boats of every size and budget, and the association's standing invitation is blunt and welcoming: "No boat is too small or too slow to participate." Ken Hill currently holds the title of Commodore, and the Facebook community runs as the private group Lake Macquarie Trailer Sailers. The character is a genuine dual racing-and-cruising culture. Members can race, cruise or do both, and the calendar honours each equally — a competitive side built around monthly race weekends on Lake Macquarie, and a cruising side whose Saturday evening gatherings around a fire are as much the point as the miles covered. Prospective members are invited along to a couple of activities and a monthly meeting before joi

Sailing club

Australia's yacht clubs do not come much younger, or much more ambitious, than Newcastle Cruising Yacht Club. Incorporated in April 1994, it describes itself as one of the newest clubs in the country and certainly the newest carrying significant club and marina assets — and it has spent three decades making up for lost time. Australian Sailing named it the NSW/ACT Club of the Year for 2019 and again for 2022, and by 2022 membership had passed 1,300, growing more than 30 per cent in a single year. The club wears a deliberate dual identity: a licensed hospitality venue and functions space on one hand, a serious sailing centre on the other. Executive chef Luke Carpenter framed it memorably — they don't have 180 poker machines, they have 180 marina berths. The sailing resume is formidable for so young a club. It is the home club of Will Ryan, the Tokyo 2020 Olympic 470 gold medallist, whose grandfather counted among the founders, and of Laser Radial world championship medallist Jacquie Ellis. It revived the Newcastle Regatta as SailFest in 2019, headlined by the TP52 Gold Cup, billed as the biggest gathering of TP52s in the country. It has twice hosted the Australian IRC Championships

Sailing club

Keelboat in Wickham, NSW.

Sailing club

The only marina on Phillip Island, at Newhaven on Western Port, a 188-berth all-weather safe haven for boats from 6m to 12m with visitor berths for overnight stays.

Sailing club

Newport Cruising Yacht Club occupies the sociable end of Redcliffe Peninsula sailing, and it does so by design: a community club that sails from Scarborough and the Newport canal estate and states plainly that it promotes social interaction and family participation. Affiliated with Australian Sailing and incorporated under its present name, it was formerly the Moreton Bay Yacht Club, and its culture favours participation over polish — weekly pursuit races that finish at the clubhouse door, sunset races that end at the dinner table, and an annual calendar of events whose names members clearly enjoy saying out loud. The club spent much of its life without a permanent home, renting space as it went, which makes the opening of its first purpose-built clubhouse in 2021 a genuine landmark: a $205,000 project beside the canals near Talobilla Park, funded largely by state government and council support. It is one of two yacht clubs serving the Newport canal suburb, the other being the Moreton Bay Boat Club. What the club offers is a complete, unpretentious racing and cruising life for keelboat sailors on the northern bay: Wednesday and Saturday afternoon sailing, presentations in the clubh

Sailing club

Keelboat in Newport, NSW.

Sailing club

Dinghy/Multihull in Noosa, QLD.

Sailing club

Combined sailing and rowing club at 142 Gympie Terrace, Noosaville, formed by a 1984 merger, with a riverfront clubhouse opened in 1994. Hosts Noosa River sailing regattas, junior sailing, Sailability and rowing programs; licensed bar and dining overlooking the river.

Sailing club

Dinghy in Norah Head, NSW.

Sailing club

Yacht Club (mixed) in Normanville, SA.

Sailing club

"We sail on land & water" — the motto is a survival story compressed into five words. When this club's lake was drained out from under it in 2010, it refused to die; it bought a land yacht instead. Today North East Windsport Club is one of the very few Australian clubs where a member can race a dinghy on a mountain lake one weekend and a Blokart at 50 km/h down a Gippsland beach the next, and it fields the biggest team in the country at the national Blokart championships. The membership is scattered across the entire north east — Wangaratta, Benalla, Beechworth, Wandiligong, Albury, Yarrawonga, Echuca, even Paynesville on the Gippsland coast — which makes the club less a local fixture than a regional network. Commodore Ken Horne, who built the trophies for the 2025 nationals with the Wangaratta Men's Shed, typifies the hands-on culture. Fees are deliberately modest: $180 for a family, $20 social, $10 day membership for visitors, with a "remote" category for those living more than 80 kilometres away. Hand-steered Blokarts give the club an inclusive edge that matters: people with lower-limb disabilities can compete on genuinely equal terms, one of land sailing's quiet strengths. Ad

Sailing club

Mixed in North Haven, SA.

Sailing club

When Bowen sailors gathered for a public meeting in March 1950, they set out to create something their town had never had: a dedicated cruising yacht club for North Queensland, headquartered at Bowen and affiliated with the Queensland Cruising Yacht Club. The ambition on the table that night was anything but modest — harbour contests, weekend passages across to the Whitsunday Passage, and, in time, genuine ocean racing. More than seventy years on, the North Queensland Cruising Yacht Club remains the town's keelboat and cruising institution, an Australian Sailing affiliated club that grew directly out of the post-war surge of enthusiasm for offshore competition, when the Sydney to Hobart and Brisbane to Gladstone contests had captured the imagination of coastal communities up and down the eastern seaboard. The founding fleet tells its own story about the kind of sailing the club was built for. Alf Schultz's Empress, Stan Roberts' Amatrix and Jack Ruddle's Lorelei formed the cruising core, alongside five Linton Hope Raters, while the restricted yacht Stonehaven was being converted into a thirty-foot cruiser. These were boats meant to go somewhere, and that spirit of passage-making s

Sailing club

Some clubs guard their patch of harbour jealously; Northbridge Sailing Club simply got on with quietly producing some of the most influential sailing design the country has seen. Tucked at the end of Sailors Bay Road on upper Middle Harbour, it is a small community club where the membership spans from five-year-olds to sailors in their seventies and beyond, ranging in temperament from thoroughly laid back to fiercely competitive. Local press has called it "one of Sydney Harbour's best kept secrets", and the club itself talks about friendships formed on the clubhouse deck and on regatta road trips lasting a lifetime. Parents like the healthy outdoor environment away from screens; teenagers relish the freedom of an informal club that trusts them with boats. Then there is the name on the street sign. The club's address is 1 Bethwaite Lane, renamed in honour of the family that made this place matter far beyond Willoughby. Frank Bethwaite — DFC, later OAM, and a 2020 inductee into the Australian Sailing Hall of Fame — was a member from 1959, and the NS14 dinghy was conceived in a clubhouse conversation here before evolving into the Nova and then the Tasar, of which around 3,000 have be

Sailing club

Nowra Community Sailing Club measures its wealth differently from most clubs: since 2017 it has had no clubhouse at all, and it kept sailing anyway. "THE CLUB GOES ON!!" declared the club after fire destroyed its historic home on the Shoalhaven River, and that stubborn cheerfulness captures the place. This is a small, passionate community club whose members describe sailing as a sport of strategy, fitness and fun, and dinghy sailing as something that can be a solo pursuit or one for the whole family. The fleet on the river mixes Spirals, Finns, Lasers, Manly Graduates and Hansas, with the firm policy that all classes are very welcome. What really sets Nowra apart is an inclusivity most clubs only talk about. The club calls itself totally inclusive and says it is the only one it knows of where Hansa accessibility dinghies race in the same fleet as every other boat. That claim has pedigree: Hansa Sailing Systems, whose accessible dinghies are used worldwide, are manufactured at South Nowra, and in spring 2015 the club ran the Hansa 2.3 23rd Birthday Regatta — 30 boats and 40 sailors from four states and territories over two days, 80 guests at the dinner, and Hansa founder Chris Mitc

Sailing club

Dinghy/Multihull in Nudgee Beach, QLD.

Sailing club

Oak Flats Sailing Club has outlasted almost everything around it. Founded in 1949 on the southern shore of Lake Illawarra, it is the second-oldest sailing club in the Illawarra, behind only the Illawarra Yacht Club at Warrawong, and in February 2025 it marked 75 years with 60 to 70 people — founding members among them — gathering to watch club historian Kevin Gillis OAM, then 94, present a slideshow of the decades. The generational depth at that party told its own story: as the club noted, there were blokes in their eighties who had sailed there when they were ten, and one old-timer even recognised his dog in a faded black-and-white photograph. Small, family-oriented and stubbornly enduring, the club is described by its own people as a real get-together place. These days about half a dozen boats hit the water each weekend, a long way from the hundred-boat fleets of the club's peak, and COVID-19 ranks among the toughest membership challenges in its history. But the ambition is plain: rebuild the base and make sure the club is still there in another 25 years. Community Bank Oak Flats sponsorships help keep it afloat, and the club's record as a nursery of talent gives the rebuilding

Sailing club

Membership here is measured in sea miles rather than locker keys. The Ocean Racing Club of Victoria is a not-for-profit that draws its members from the major yacht clubs across the state and, by deliberate design, runs no clubhouse and no marina — it exists to organise ocean racing, not to compete with the clubs its members belong to. Its stated objectives are to develop and expand the sport, coordinate and control every major ocean race run within or starting from Victoria, serve as a centre of knowledge, and keep ocean racing exciting but intrinsically safe. That remit makes the ORCV the closest thing Victorian offshore sailing has to a governing engine room. An Australian Sailing member club, affiliated through Yachting Australia to the sport's international federation, it runs a ladder of events from Category 5 bay races through Category 3 coastal sprints to Category 2 offshore passages — Melbourne to King Island, Port Fairy, Devonport and, above all, the Melbourne to Hobart Westcoaster, 435 nautical miles down Tasmania's western edge. Double-handed and shorthanded divisions, capped at four crew with autohelms welcome, run through the entire program, reflecting how offshore sa

Sailing club

Most sailing clubs begin with sailors; this one began with anglers. The Ocean Reef Sea Sports Club traces its organised life to a fishing competition held at Pinnaroo Point — now Mullaloo Point — on 29 July 1973, and even today sailing is one strand among several in a club built for everyone who uses Perth's northern coastline. Angling, diving, power boating, sailing and a social section share a single clubhouse at Ocean Reef Marina, making this less a yacht club than a complete sea-sports community. Don't mix it up with the entirely separate Ocean Reef Yacht Club; nor should the sailing section's supporting role be mistaken for a minor one, because sailors have been racing here since the club's first year. In an earlier life it operated as the Whitfords Sea Sports Club, and its fifty-year history has been lovingly compiled by Ian and Jill Younghusband — a document that records everything from the first surf-cat sailing event in December 1973, which drew sixty to seventy boats, to the 1975 creation of the Whitfords Volunteer Sea Rescue Group. That rescue-group heritage still echoes: the club's new facility sits alongside a new Marine Rescue Whitfords headquarters. Demand to join

Sailing club

Yacht Club in Ocean Reef, WA.