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Sailing club

Mixed in Onslow, WA.

Sailing club

Few sailing clubs in Australia can claim a home water quite like this one. Ord River Sailing Club sails on Lake Argyle, the vast man-made expanse created when the Ord River was dammed in the East Kimberley, roughly as far from the nation's metropolitan yachting circuits as a club can be while still flying the Australian Sailing burgee. In June 2026 the national body formally welcomed the Kununurra-based organisation into its affiliated network, listing it with twenty-two members — a modest number that says little about the ambition behind the club's revival. Weeks earlier, on Sunday 10 May 2026, fifty-six local people had turned out for the club's first Discover Sailing Day, a remarkable response for a small inland community better known for cattle country and the Argyle diamond story than for start lines and handicap sheets. The club is incorporated, GST-registered and has held an active ABN since 1 July 2009, with its postal address in Kununurra and a listing among the community groups at the town's Neighbourhood House. Its online footprint is thin — directory entries, government records and class association archives rather than a dedicated website — which makes the recent momen

Sailing club

Few sailing clubs anywhere in Australia can point to a rivalry that has run, without interruption of spirit, for more than a century. Oxley Sailing Club, which races on the Brisbane River's Indooroopilly Reach in the city's south-west, has been racing against its old friends at South Brisbane Sailing Club since the 1921–22 season — a contest that has moved through sixteen-foot skiffs, Mirrors, Herons, Pacers and Lasers, and that today produces one of the more charming trophies in Australian dinghy sailing. The Nose and Tail Trophy, created in 2000 from a Laser hull cut into three pieces, sees the bow and the stern contested each year by teams alternating between the two clubs, with Oxley holding the silverware in 2023. The club describes itself, in directory listings, as a family-oriented club, and the description fits the scale of the place. From its base at 142 Leybourne Street, Chelmer — roughly seven kilometres from the Brisbane CBD — Oxley runs Saturday-afternoon racing through a September-to-April season, with Pacers at the heart of the current fleet and visitors welcomed from noon on race days. Tackers courses for children and an adult learn-to-sail program round out a cale

Sailing club

Catamarans rule the beach at Sand Point. Palm Beach Sailing Club is Pittwater's dedicated off-the-beach multihull club, a place where Hobie 16s — the class with more than 113,000 boats built worldwide — share the sand with Taipans, Nacras, Formula 18s, A-Class cats and Wetas. Windsurfers race with the fleet, dinghies are made welcome, and everything is scored on yardstick so a mixed mob of boats can compete meaningfully on the same course. It is an emphatically unpretentious outfit. The membership skews towards ordinary Sydney suburbs rather than the Palm Beach postcode, runs from kids through to sailors in their seventies, and splits roughly evenly between men and women. Yet the same club that teaches an absolute beginner on a Sunday morning has also produced a staggering honour roll: Olympic gold medallist David Forbes, bronze medallists Chris Cairns, Mitch Booth and John Forbes, and Rio 2016 silver medallists Jason Waterhouse and Lisa Darmanin all raced here. Pittwater Online News has claimed no other waterway in Australia has produced as many internationally renowned sailors, and the club's world title holders — among them Rod and Kerry Waterhouse, Ian Bashford, Martin Cross an

Sailing club

There is no clubhouse, no marina, and no pretension — and that is precisely the point. Palm Beach Yacht Club was created for people who own yachts and want to race and cruise them in good company without paying for real estate they will never use. With no building or berth expenses to carry, fees stay deliberately low: a full family boat-owner membership ran to $350 a year in 2025–26, and the club says plainly that friendly sportsmanship matters more to it than race results. The motto is "Enjoy Your Boat", and the culture lives up to it. The program is substantial — up to fifty races a year across fortnightly Friday twilight events, monthly Sunday races, seasonal sprint series and summer and winter pointscores, with courses sailed with or without spinnakers. Boats moor on Pittwater, members share access to club casual moorings in three locations, and all on-water communication runs through VHF Channel 73. Smaller fleet sizes are treated as a virtue rather than a limitation, pitched as the ideal low-stress setting for less experienced sailors to find their way into yacht racing. The social calendar keeps the ashore side busy too: post-race dinners at Club Palm Beach — membership of

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 schedu

Sailing club

A small strip of the Bayside foreshore carries an outsized piece of Australian sailing history: this is the birthplace of the Australian Sailfish, the home-designed single-hander that spread across the country and as far as Papua New Guinea. Parkdale Yacht Club remains very much in that grassroots mould — a progressive, volunteer-based club in the City of Kingston devoted to community sailing and windsurfing, where the racing fleets are Minnows, Lasers, Pacers, 125s, catamarans and boards rather than anything requiring a bank manager or a full-time crew. The club is not shy about its pedigree. It states that Olympians, world, national and state champions "have called Parkdale Yacht Club their home" — the club's own claim, offered without names, so take it as testimony rather than a roll call. What is verifiable is the lineage of the place itself: founded just after the war (1946 by the club's account; the council's park page says 1945), it sailed from the same Parkdale beach for decades before a $2.9 million redevelopment delivered a new clubhouse in May 2021, shared with the local Girl Guides and Beach Patrol Australia. Summer brings a genuine beachside social rhythm — the PYC c

Sailing club

From the tip of Looking Glass Point at Gladesville, Parramatta River Sailing Club runs keelboat racing on the main tributary of Sydney Harbour — a stretch of water where tides, sandbanks and tight river bends matter as much as boatspeed. It is a small, self-described friendly and unpretentious club, and Afloat Magazine went further, dubbing it "A Jewel on the Parramatta River". Racing runs in two handicap divisions, one for smaller yachts and one for larger, with spinnaker racing each Saturday through spring, summer and autumn, alternate Saturdays in winter, plus Wednesday-evening twilight racing without spinnakers while daylight saving runs. Saturday starts go off after half past one, when, as the club cheerfully admits, it is hoped a good wind will pipe in. The ethos is stated plainly: competitive without being untrustworthy, celebrating good skippering, wilyness, skill and strategy. After racing, members gather in the clubhouse for a beer, the results, a debrief and — the club insists, most importantly — a ribbing and roasting of rival yachts, skippers and crew. The trophy shelf reflects that humour: alongside some genuinely old silverware sits the Flotsam and Jetsam Award, awar

Sailing club

Dinghy/Multihull in Mandurah (Peel region), WA.

Sailing club

Dinghy in Peppermint Grove, WA.

Sailing club

Every race start, every safety boat shift, every coaching session, every sandwich in the canteen and every pour behind the bar at Perth Dinghy Sailing Club is delivered by a volunteer. The organisation describes itself as among the very few Perth yacht clubs run entirely by unpaid members, and that ethos has carried it from a 1903 breakaway on Perth Water to its present home on the Crawley foreshore, directly across the Swan River from the University of Western Australia. The model clearly works. Australian Sailing named the club its WA Club of the Year (Category B) for 2023 and again for 2024, and elevated it to national finalist status in 2024 — recognition, by the governing body's own judgment, of what a committed volunteer base can sustain. Membership sits at roughly one hundred senior sailors alongside a substantial junior contingent, with several generations of the same families appearing on the club's books. That family thread runs through everything here: the trophies, the museum inside the clubrooms, and a racing culture built around lightweight dinghies that reward skill over budget. The club credits its environment with producing sailors who have competed at the highest

Sailing club

Long-established yacht club on the Swan River at Dalkeith with marina pens and a clubhouse, catering for sailing and power-boat members.

Sailing club

The club describes itself as "a throwback to earlier days – a classic 1960's boat club", and the phrase is earned rather than nostalgic marketing. The two-level modernist clubhouse on Western Parade has stood beside Point Leo beach since 1961, its upper balcony — likened by heritage assessors to a boat deck or a ship's prow — still watching over a foreshore where families rig Lasers, launch boards and spread beach towels within the same few hundred metres. Sailing, surfing and socialising share equal billing, which is rare among Victorian clubs. The sailing side centres on off-the-beach classes — Laser/ILCA and Impulse dinghies leading the racing, with mixed fleets around them — while the surf side taps a break that the club rates among the finest in Victoria. Stand-up paddleboarding, beach yoga and a "kids Olympics" fill out the activity list, and the social calendar runs to cocktail parties, Moonlight Cinema nights and live music. It is, in short, a beach club in the fullest sense, run for member families rather than function bookings — though members can hire the clubhouse privately between May and September. A Mornington Peninsula heritage review found the club "has been at t

Sailing club

Keelboat in Largs North, SA.

Sailing club

Ask around the Gippsland sailing scene and Port Albert comes up with a smile: a small, volunteer-run country club on the South Gippsland coast where the competition is keen but the tempo stays unhurried. The club calls itself a laid-back outfit kept going by volunteers of all ages, and that self-assessment shows in everything from the Sunday-afternoon race rhythm to the fortnightly Thursday Lunch Club, a social fixture that gathers members from early February whether or not sailing is on the agenda. The fleet is mixed and unpretentious. Off-the-beach dinghies share start lines with trailable yachts, and anyone who doesn't yet own a boat can borrow from the club's dinghy stock rather than watch from the bank. That open-handed approach suits the setting. Port Albert is a small historic fishing village, and the club works as much as a community institution as a sporting one. Visiting sailors can step into a race through Australian Sailing's SailPass scheme, the club is affiliated with the national body, and its boats carry the NC sail-number prefix. Port Albert also sits inside one of the busier interclub circuits in country Victoria. It belongs to the Eastern Region group of Gippsl

Sailing club

Yacht Club (mixed) in Port Augusta, SA.

Sailing club

Where the Dawesville Cut meets the Harvey Estuary, on the waterway's southeast corner, a young club has built a sailing culture around two craft most organisations would never pair: racing yachts and outrigger canoes. Port Bouvard Yacht Club bills itself as a club "for Sail and Outrigger Canoe," and it operates not as a standalone body but as a division of the Port Bouvard Recreation and Sporting Club Incorporated, sharing the broader community facility at 1 Thisbe Drive, Dawesville. The geography places it twenty kilometres south of Mandurah and about eighty kilometres south of Perth, on the foreshore of the Mandurah estuary system, with the clubhouse outlook sweeping down the Harvey Estuary — panoramic, in the club's own assessment. The Australian Flying Fifteen class association dates the club's establishment to the late 1990s, making it one of the younger sailing organisations in Western Australia, though the exact founding year does not appear in the public record. Seven Flying Fifteens are registered at the club, giving it a meaningful stake in that classic keelboat class, and the fleet mix extends well beyond it. Office bearers listed by the club have included Commodore Kevi

Sailing club

Mixed in Port Broughton, SA.

Sailing club

There is a yacht in Australian ocean racing folklore called Wistari — designed and built in Gladstone in 1965 by Port Curtis Sailing Club yachtsman Noel Patrick, winner of the Brisbane to Gladstone on four occasions from 1971 to 1982, and holder of the race's aggregate point-score trophy. That single boat says a great deal about the club that produced her: practical, self-reliant, and deeply woven into one of Queensland's great offshore contests. Port Curtis Sailing Club, which trades publicly as the Gladstone Yacht Club from its clubhouse at 1 Goondoon Street, has been the finishing destination of the Brisbane to Gladstone Yacht Race since the event's earliest years, and its members were active supporters of the very first race in 1949. The club operates in a setting few sailing organisations can claim — within the multi-commodity Port of Gladstone, inside the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area, where bulk carriers and cruising yachts share the same horizon. From its waterfront base on Auckland Creek, with a licensed clubhouse and harbour-view veranda, the club runs an accredited Australian Sailing training school, a Saturday-afternoon sailing program, and a fleet that ranges

Sailing club

Active sailing club at Lymington Road, Cygnet, providing moorings in Port Cygnet and often able to find a spare mooring for visiting yachts; two slipways, one handling boats to about 12 tonnes and 12m.

Sailing club

Club at Beauty Point on the Tamar estuary supplying diesel fuel and fresh water to visiting yachts, with slipway/haul-out facilities; may be able to accommodate visiting yachts.

Sailing club

Ask the Port Denison Sailing Club about its age and it will give you a date that stops you in your tracks: 1864. On the club's own account, that founding year makes it Queensland's second oldest sailing club — a claim it prints proudly alongside the observation that Bowen's wide sandy beach and steady trade winds have been ideal for dinghy sailing ever since. Whatever the precise historical verdict, what is beyond dispute is that organised sailing at Bowen is genuinely ancient by Queensland standards: W. H. Darwen was registering boats with the club by 1894, a Port Denison Sailing and Aquatic Sports Club was active in the local press in 1909, and a surviving photograph of opening day of the 1918 season shows six named boats — Faith, Reliance, Denisona, Gulnare, Irene and Ruby — ready to race. The modern club keeps that long tradition in everyday working order from its clubhouse at 1 Thomas Street, hard on Bowen's Front Beach, looking across Sinclair Bay towards Gloucester Island with the northern Whitsundays forming the backdrop. Its season runs from September through to Easter, its off-the-beach racing welcomes both private boats and club charter boats, and its junior sailors hav

Sailing club

Mixed in Dongara, WA.

Sailing club

Every Wednesday afternoon in Port Douglas, something rather wonderful happens at the yacht club on Dickson Inlet: member volunteers take complete strangers sailing, free of charge, into the tropical evening. The club calls it WAGS — Wednesday Afternoon Go Sailing — and it has become one of the most distinctive community offerings of any yacht club in the country. Sign on from half past three, be on the water by four-thirty, back by half past six, and stay for dinner and a drink at the clubhouse. In forty years, the Port Douglas Yacht Club has grown from a group of friends who opened only on race days into the social and sailing heart of one of Australia's most beautiful coastal towns, and WAGS captures its spirit perfectly. The club began in 1985, founded by a group of friends and sailing enthusiasts, and incorporated to promote, encourage and foster the sport of yachting and fellowship between yachtsmen. Its clubhouse bar and restaurant — known affectionately as The Yachty — now trades five days a week from its waterfront position at 1 Spinnaker Close, opposite the Reef Marina and beside Closehaven Marina, with a liveaboard membership culture that sees many members' homes floatin