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Sailing club

"Run by sailors for sailors" is how Beaumaris Yacht Club describes itself, and the phrase fits a club that has kept its focus narrow and its atmosphere easy. This is an off-the-beach dinghy club on the Ricketts Point foreshore in Beaumaris, sailing the waters of Beaumaris Bay on Port Phillip's eastern side. There is no marina culture and no keelboat division — boats come off trailers and dollies on the beach, and the Sunday rhythm of morning training and afternoon racing sets the week. The social fabric is deliberately simple. Members gather after Sunday racing, regular barbecues punctuate the season and a Christmas function rounds out the year. The club publishes its duty roster, rules and child-safe standards openly, the marks of a volunteer-run family club that takes its obligations seriously without taking itself too seriously. Its hall doubles as a function venue, helping keep the finances of a small bayside club healthy year-round. One point of clarity matters for visitors: Beaumaris Yacht Club is not the Beaumaris Motor Yacht Squadron — a distinct organisation founded in February 1959 and based at the far end of Beaumaris Bay. The yacht club is the dinghy sailors' club at

Sailing club

Yacht Club (mixed) in Bellerive, TAS.

Sailing club

When Commodore James Griffiths told an interviewer in 2021 that almost 50,000 social members stood behind his club's sailing activity, he was describing an arrangement few Australian sailing clubs could imagine: a vast licensed venue on Lake Macquarie whose entire commercial weight exists, as it has since 1922, to put 16ft skiffs on the water. Belmont 16s is, by its own account, the leading 16ft skiff club in the country and one of the largest sailing clubs in New South Wales by Australian Sailing affiliation band — yet its sailing heart beats to a proudly working-class rhythm. Griffiths characterised the Belmont fleet as tradies and miners who grafted a performance, in pointed contrast to the well-heeled rivals from Manly, in a city-versus-country feud the club itself compares to the 1997 NRL grand final. That rivalry produced some of Australian sailing's biggest names — Treharne, Barnabas, Wilmot and Hyde among them — and it still pulls champions through the door: Nathan Wilmot and Malcolm Page, the most successful 470 pairing in history, guest-sailed a club race here in 2021. Beyond the skiffs, the club sails 13ft skiffs plus O'pen Skiffs, Lasers, Cherubs, Pelicans and Flying 1

Sailing club

The alumni list reads like an America's Cup program. Glenn Ashby — Olympic silver medallist, multiple world champion and wing trimmer on BMW Oracle's America's Cup-winning trimaran — learned to sail at Bendigo Yacht Club, as did A-Class catamaran world champions Allan and Greg Goodall and Nacra world champion Adam Beattie. The club markets Lake Eppalock's waters as, in its own words, "the perfect breeding grounds" for the world's best sailors, and while that is plainly promotional, the names above give it unusual substance for a club based on an irrigation reservoir between Bendigo and Heathcote. The club itself is a mixed fleet operation — keelboats and dinghies sharing the lake — with a family-centred culture spanning competitive racing, cruising and a full social program. Members enjoy unlimited year-round access to the facilities, day or night, including for private entertaining, which says something about how the place is trusted and used. It runs on the familiar country-club model of working bees and weekend volunteering, and it communicates through a regular newsletter, "Mainsheet", and published race results. In late 2025 the club recruited a new sail-training team, a sig

Sailing club

Half a century on the Clarence River has given Big River Sailing Club an unshakeable sense of what it is: a small, volunteer-run country club where the welcome extends, in the words of its own anniversary coverage, to all regardless of age or skill. Based on Harwood Island in the Northern Rivers, the club takes its name from the local nickname for the Clarence, one of Australia's largest river systems, and its sailing calendar is built around that broad, working waterway. Regatta weekends here draw divisions for NS14s and other monohulls, quicker monohull divisions, one- and two-up catamarans, trailable yachts and a growing Weta fleet — six Wetas lined up at the 2025 Bridge to Breakers — a genuinely mixed fleet that mirrors the club's come-one-come-all character. The signature event is November's Bridge to Breakers Regatta, a long river race from Harwood down to Iluka near the mouth and back, which pulls visiting sailors from as far afield as Southport Yacht Club across the Queensland border. Visitors camp at the club, dine at the Harwood Hotel and talk for months afterwards about the club's famed Big River evening meal. The regatta now doubles as a memorial to Malcolm Eggins, the

Sailing club

A nineteenth-century ironclad warship guards the entrance to Black Rock's sailing water, and in many ways it sets the tone for the club behind it: substantial, storied and slightly larger than life. Black Rock Yacht Club sails from Half Moon Bay on Port Phillip's eastern shore, where the scuttled HMVS Cerberus, acquired by the club itself in 1926, still lies as a breakwater. The club describes itself as a leading off-the-beach club, and with membership now exceeding 700, grown from a founding group of just five, the scale is hard to dispute. The competitive record is the club's pride. Its sailors have taken Victorian, Australian and World championship titles in numbers few beach clubs can match, a striking share of them having begun in its own junior program, and it has hosted numerous World Championship regattas, most notably the 1995 Finn Gold Cup — Olympic sailing's most storied heavyweight dinghy title, run off Black Rock's beach. Club historian Noel Sutcliffe records that among peer clubs, Black Rock is regarded as one that "does it right", a reputation built on race management as much as on results. The fleet history reads like a survey of dinghy design: fishermen's boats,

Sailing club

Counting more than 2,200 members in recent seasons, Blairgowrie Yacht Squadron counts itself among the biggest sailing clubs anywhere on Port Phillip, and it wears that scale lightly indeed. The stated values are plain enough to fit on a burgee — "Family, Friendship, Sailing" — and the membership mix backs them up convincingly: off-the-beach dinghy sailors, J70 sportsboat crews, keelboat and powerboat owners, and a large social contingent drawn from the Mornington Peninsula's holiday population. Racing is the engine room. The calendar has carried an extraordinary procession of state, national and world championships across the decades, from Sabres and Lasers through to A-Class catamarans, Hobie Cats, Musto Skiffs and 29ers, and the summer fixture everyone circles is the Petersville Regatta for keelboats, revived by the club in December 2015 and now sailed across the Christmas–New Year window. Under Commodore Georgina Plumridge the squadron operates as a modern, professionally managed concern — it appointed its first club manager back in 1994 — yet the volunteer instinct never left. This is a club where members once made the clubhouse bricks by hand, and working bees still underpin

Sailing club

There is no clubhouse at Blues Point Yacht Club, and that is entirely the point. Founded in 1980 inside the Blues Point Hotel at McMahons Point, the club still calls the pub its premises — "no hoity-toity fancy clubhouses for us", as it puts it — and the arrangement shapes everything about its personality. Members' yachts sit on moorings scattered around Sydney Harbour; the fleet gathers on the water rather than at a marina; and after every race the whole show decamps to the pub on Blues Point Road for informal prize-giving, race analysis and, on Thursdays, the famous meat raffle. The club describes itself as a friendly, inclusive, community-based racing club that doesn't take itself too seriously, and it backs the relaxed pitch with what it claims are probably the lowest fees on the Harbour. Don't mistake the informality for indifference. Racing happens on the harbour's eastern reaches, which the club unashamedly calls the best water in Sydney, and the calendar carries real substance: Spring and Autumn point-score series, memorial trophies honouring past members, a Christmas fun race with a shore-side barbecue, a Ladies Day race and the annual Don Deller Pittwater Weekend combini

Sailing club

Family-friendly volunteer sailing club founded 1964, racing on Kogarah Bay, Botany Bay and the Georges River with bay, sprint and twilight series plus an active cruising fleet.

Sailing club

The club logo says it plainly: Est 1919. Brighton & Seacliff Yacht Club has been sailing off the same stretch of Adelaide coastline for more than a century, and it carries that seniority with some swagger — the club bills itself as Adelaide's leading off-the-beach sailing club and operates as a function centre, a sailing and aquatics school and a community hub, with two bars and a bistro on site. The scale of the operation backs the confidence. Racing is supported by as many as eight powerboats, two tractors for beach launching and a fleet of club-owned sailing boats, and the class list is one of the longest in the state, running from Sabres, 505s and Contenders through Australian Sharpies, International 420s and NS14s to Impulse, Optimist and Laser dinghies, the Payne-Mortlock Sailing Canoe, Windsurfer LT boards and trailer yachts. The Sabre fleet alone counts more than twenty regular sailors aged from their early twenties into their sixties and beyond; the Impulse class is surging across South Australia, with this club singled out as a particular hotspot; and the Windsurfer LT fleet regularly puts more than ten boards on the course most Saturdays. In January 2024 the club hoste

Sailing club

One class of boat, pursued for well over a century, defines this organisation. Brisbane 18 Footers Sailing Club — which styles itself the city's home for both the modern 18-footer and its heritage skiff cousins — turned one hundred in 2020 and stands as the city's original 18-footer body, affiliated with Australian Sailing. Around the modern 18ft skiff orbit the historical 10ft and 12ft skiffs, boats that keep the class's long memory physically alive on the water. The club's pedigree is remarkable: by its own historical reckoning, Queensland craft claimed 23 national 18-footer titles up to 1958, and its members and designers repeatedly changed the sport itself — the heel-less Aberdare of the 1930s provoked a schism that created a whole new Sydney league, while the Ben Lexcen-designed Venom ruled the 1961 world titles on the Brisbane River. The lean decades that followed, as costs and technology favoured the southern fleets, have lately given way to a genuine revival: in January 2025 the club staged the national championship on Waterloo Bay, ending a 35-year absence of the title event from Queensland waters. Today the club operates without a single clubhouse of its own, racing inste

Sailing club

Quay Street in Bulimba ends at the river, and at that full stop stands a sailing club the local paper ranks among the oldest in Brisbane. Brisbane Sailing Squadron has occupied Bulimba Point in one form or another since 1921, and its roughly 300 members — spread across Life, Senior, Cadet and Social categories — include numerous families now sailing in their second and third generations. Run by volunteers and pitched squarely at households, the squadron races 16ft skiffs, a class it has fielded without interruption for a century, alongside Lasers, Sabots and RS Quests; it also doubles as the river base for the Brisbane 18 Footers' heritage skiffs and junior arm. Its trophy tradition is substantial: the club's own history credits it with many State and National champions and an Olympian at two Games. The physical heart of the place is the 1953 clubhouse, raised over time to slide boat storage beneath, and crowned since 2003 by a deck that serves both post-race crowds and paying functions. Australian Sailing has profiled the squadron in its Club in Focus series, and the calendar keeps memory close: February's Passed Members Memorial Race honours lost sailors, while March's Tugulawa C

Sailing club

Plenty of sailing clubs count their members in the hundreds. Brisbane Valley Sailing Club has between ten and fifteen — mostly older sailors, by its own cheerful admission — and treats that number as no obstacle at all. From the northern side of Lake Wivenhoe, which the club bills as South East Queensland's largest lake, this small and friendly off-the-beach outfit runs a full season of trailer-boat racing and, each June, a Winter Marathon that pulls as many as a hundred boats to the start. That event's draw, wildly out of proportion to the membership, makes it a genuine destination on the regional off-the-beach calendar. The club was founded in 1978, incorporated in Queensland during 2006, and sits on Australian Sailing's affiliation list. Racing welcomes every off-the-beach single-hull and multihull class, with Weta trimarans prominent among the current fleet. Administration is lean and transparent — each season's race calendar and sailing instructions are published online — and the club wears its values on its homepage, displaying supporter badges for two national sporting-integrity programs — Pride in Sport along with Play by the Rules — alongside its sponsors, Doyle Sails Quee

Sailing club

Tides run the show in Broome. This Kimberley town sits on some of the most dramatically tidal water in Australia — as general context, the ebb and flow off Cable Beach is measured in metres, not centimetres — so it is no surprise that the local sailing club arranges its life around the tide tables. Broome Sailing Club meets on Sundays every second week, with session times that shift to suit the water, launching off the beach at Gantheaume Point, the red-rock headland closing off Cable Beach's southern end. It is a club without a permanent clubhouse: as of 2019 it was collaborating with the Shire of Broome and the Broome Turf Club on designs for a permanent base at a proposed Gantheaume Point location, and its old website has since gone quiet. Honesty requires a caveat here: the club is absent from Australian Sailing's present affiliation fee schedule, so its formal status is unverified, and much of what is publicly known dates from a 2019 Australian Sailing feature and Shire of Broome documents. What those sources show is a small, welcoming, beach-launched operation — public sailing days with hire boats available, day membership from ten dollars, a barbecue after the afternoon sail

Sailing club

Some sailing clubs announce themselves with trophy cabinets and championship banners; the Brunswick Heads Cruising Yacht Association reveals itself more quietly, as the organisation you are directed to when you want to put a boat anywhere in the Brunswick Heads Boat Harbour. Mooring enquiries for the harbour are routed to the association's secretary, making this small incorporated body the de facto waterfront steward of one of the Far North Coast's most beloved boating villages. The name says cruising rather than racing, and that orientation fits the town perfectly: Brunswick Heads has been a family seaside-holiday destination since the 1920s, built around river fishing, the fish-and-chips culture of the boat harbour and a summer calendar anchored by the Woodchop Carnival, McGregor's Carnival and Christmas and New Year fireworks. The association sits in the smallest band of Australian Sailing-affiliated New South Wales clubs, one of roughly forty community groups keeping village life ticking over in the Byron Shire town. Its public footprint is deliberately modest — there is no glossy clubhouse or marketing machine — but the sailing it supports is genuine. Sabot dinghies are saile

Sailing club

Other (boat club) in Alonnah, TAS.

Sailing club

Where the Burnett River widens toward the sea at Burnett Heads, roughly twenty kilometres downstream from Bundaberg city and just off the Port road, a community sailing club keeps one of regional Queensland's oldest sporting traditions afloat. Bundaberg Sailing Club appears on Australian Sailing's affiliation schedule, and its precinct serves a broader boating community than its name suggests: Sailability Bundaberg operates from the same base, as does the local dragon boat club. The club's own former website asserted that organised sailing had been part of the town's sporting life since 1908, and spoke of a long record of sail training and regatta involvement. One candid caveat belongs in any current profile: that website has since lapsed — the domain now resolves to a parked page — so the club's living shopfront is effectively its Facebook presence, its directory listings and its published phone and email contacts. It is a useful reminder that a club's digital decay says nothing certain about its health on the water. The documented record points to an active body: a Queensland Government Active Clubs grant in 2023, development visits from Australian Sailing Queensland staff that s

Sailing club

Dinghy/Trailer sailer in Ayr, QLD.

Sailing club

Club at Burnie on Emu Bay; Burnie has no dedicated small-craft marina, so cruising yachts use the commercial port for shelter and provisioning via TasPorts Port Control, while the yacht club provides a social base.

Sailing club

Keelboats & dinghies in Burrinjuck, NSW.

Sailing club

Dinghy/Multihull in Busselton, WA.

Sailing club

Mixed in Busselton, WA.

Sailing club

Mixed in Cabarita, QLD.

Sailing club

Sailing in goldfields country has its own logic, and Cairn Curran Sailing Club embodies it. Based at Baringhup on the reservoir of the same name, near the historic town of Maldon in central Victoria, this is a small, volunteer-run inland club whose stated purposes are disarmingly direct: encourage recreational and competitive sailing, and run regattas. What it lacks in size it has repeatedly made up in pedigree. During the 1960s and 1970s the club stood among the most successful inland Victorian outfits in the Australian Sailfish class, producing a string of state and national titleholders from water impounded behind a dam wall on the Loddon River. That competitive instinct survives. The club's late-November off-the-beach regatta anchors its season, and its willingness to step up is well documented — in 2020 it rescued the Tasar state titles at short notice when the planned venue at Yarrawonga fell through. Local flavour runs deep here. The 2014 Fireball Victorian Championship, sailed in gusts up to 30 knots, ran as part of the "Cairn Curran Classic" with sponsorship from Chapple's Cairn Curran Estate winery, and long-time Fireball sailor Arthur "Smiley" Chapple remains part of the