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Sailing club

Volunteer sailing club at 1 Waratah Street, Cronulla, on the northern shore of Gunnamatta Bay near the public wharf; active dinghy and keelboat racing program since 1948.

Sailing club

Australia's premier ocean-racing club and home of the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race, with a 213 deep-water floating berth marina plus hardstand for sports boats. Casual berthing available to visiting yacht club members subject to space.

Sailing club

Dinghy in Culburra Beach, NSW.

Sailing club

Dinghy in Davistown, NSW.

Sailing club

Dinghy in Dobell, NSW.

Sailing club

Inclusion at Dobroyd Aquatic Club isn't a program bolted onto the side of the club — it is the club. The constitution commits to "the promotion of the sport of sailing for everyone", and the practice matches the paper: people with disability race in the regular Saturday competition, guide dogs and wheelchairs are described as par for the course, and a partnership with Sailability stretching back roughly three decades has made this Rodd Point club a World Sailing inclusion case study. The club's own words for itself are friendly and inclusive, focused on making sailing "fun, affordable and accessible for all", and the fleet reflects that breadth. Around 200 members sail everything from Optimists, Sabots and Flying 11s at the junior end through Lasers, Tasars, Herons, MGs and Hansas for adults — plus two growth areas you won't find at most Sydney clubs: windsurfing raceboards and radio-controlled Lasers. The club's Raceboard fleet is regarded as one of NSW's leaders in that branch of the sport, by the club's own account often bringing home trophies. What makes the culture work is a duty-sharing system in which every sailor, led by class captains, lays marks, runs rescue boats and o

Sailing club

Fifty or more ILCA dinghies on the start line every week, racing off one of Sydney Harbour's most famous bays — Double Bay Sailing Club hosts what it describes as "the largest fleet of ILCA dinghies in Australia", and its stated ambition is "to be amongst the best Laser sailing clubs in the world". Those are the club's own claims, but the weekly turnout, the honour boards and the calibre of sailors who race here give them substance. This is a one-class racing club, pure and simple: everyone sails the same boat, and the competition runs from first-timers to state, national and world champions. The membership page describes the largest regular racing fleet in the country, and the calendar backs it up — Saturday afternoon racing from August through April, twilight sprint racing on permanent harbour markers midweek in daylight saving, and winter Sunday-morning racing from May to July that the club cheerfully compares to a British summer. Everything is run entirely by volunteers, with members drawn from all walks of life. The club's character comes with a strong sense of lineage and rivalry. The Vaucluse Challenge Series against neighbouring Vaucluse Yacht Club — one day hosted by eac

Sailing club

Few Sydney clubs can trace their purpose to a single boat, but Drummoyne Sailing Club was founded in 1913 expressly to race the 16ft skiff, and that three-crew, twin-trapeze thoroughbred still shapes the place more than a century later. From its steeply sloping site on St Georges Crescent, the clubhouse looks due north across the Parramatta River — a prospect the club has long billed as "the million dollar view" — and on summer Saturdays the balcony fills with spectators watching the skiffs tear off the 2pm start under their big masthead spinnakers, three crew with two out on the trapeze. The character here is a working harbour racing club wrapped inside a modern licensed venue, one the club itself calls one of Sydney Harbour's leading sailing clubs. The three-storey concrete clubhouse, opened in 2001, stacks sailing at ground level beneath a public club level with the Sailor's Grill and an upstairs restaurant, and membership runs from social through to class-based sailing divisions covering skiffs, yachts, Hartley TS16s, OK Dinghies, Sabots, Cherubs and Flying 11s. Yachts are now the biggest fleet by weekly numbers, and the club joins Balmain, Greenwich Flying Squadron and Parram

Sailing club

Dinghy in Empire Bay, NSW.

Sailing club

Dinghy in Ettalong Beach, NSW.

Sailing club

Dinghy in Forbes, NSW.

Sailing club

Walk the foreshore at Sandringham Beach on a summer weekend and you'll find a club running two operations at once. On the beach and the grass beside Peter Depena Reserve, kids in plastic Optimists rig for Tackers while single-handed sailors wheel ILCAs and RS Aeros toward the ramp; behind them, a licensed clubhouse — freshly rebuilt in a $10 million renovation through 2025 — serves brunch to a dining crowd watching the same water. That dual identity, community dinghy club and substantial hospitality venue on Botany Bay, defines Georges River Sailing Club. The sailing side answers to the full historic name Georges River 16ft Sailing Club, a reminder of the skiff-racing origins going back to 1927. These days the program is split sensibly across the weekend: Saturdays for single-handers — ILCA/Laser and RS Aero — Sundays for juniors, double-handed Tasars and Flying 11s, with sailboards in the mix and Wednesday twilight sailing through daylight saving. Racing is organised from September to May, managed entirely by volunteers, whom the club is always recruiting to the race management team. Guests who race more than three times are asked to take out sailing membership, with current insu

Sailing club

"Welcoming Locals Since 1932" is the tagline, and Gosford Sailing Club wears it honestly. Perched on the Brisbane Water foreshore at Masons Parade with 180-degree views over the bay, it operates as a full-service Central Coast community club — marina, restaurant, cafe, brasserie, bar, gaming lounge, even a golf section — while running one of the more decorated sailing programs in regional New South Wales. Olympic gold medallist Tom Slingsby, who skippered SailGP's Team Australia, holds longtime membership here and serves as Club Ambassador, and the club credits itself, via Australian Sailing, with developing numerous state, national and world champions across more than ninety years. The breadth of the racing calendar is striking. Fleets listed by the club take in Etchells, yachts, sports boats, ILCA dinghies, a mixed fleet, radio-controlled yachts and 16ft skiffs, alongside Sailability, SheSails and junior divisions. Racing runs Saturday afternoons from September to April with Wednesday twilight racing, and the club has become a regular host of visiting state and national championships — the 2026 season alone brought NSW state titles for the Contender, Etchells and Flying Dutchman

Sailing club

"This is what good life looks like!" declares the club motto, and at Great Lakes Sailing Club on the shore of Wallis Lake near Forster, it's easy to see the thinking. This is a relaxed, family-oriented off-the-beach catamaran club on the NSW Mid North Coast, the sort of place where the sailing season from September to March is anchored by Sunday social family sailing and where the biggest weekend of the year combines championship-standard racing with camping on the lake shore. Catamarans are the heart of the operation. The club's signature event, the WildCat Regatta, welcomes every class of off-the-beach cat and in 2026 reached its 53rd running over the October long weekend — a lineage stretching back to the early 1970s that makes it one of the longer-lived fixtures on the regional regatta calendar. Sailors tow their boats up the Pacific Highway, pitch tents beside the rigging lawns and spend three days racing on a lake the club describes as one of Australia's most picturesque waterways. The appeal cuts both ways. Competitive sailors train year-round here even outside the official season, drawn by open water and reliable room to stretch a catamaran's legs, while families treat th

Sailing club

At the foot of Bay Street in Greenwich, where Gore Creek Bay opens toward the Lane Cove River, stands a club born from an argument. Greenwich Flying Squadron was founded in 1924 as a breakaway from the Lane Cove 12ft Sailing Skiff Club, its founders insisting on "best and best" rigs — sail area unrestricted within the skiff hull dimension rules — and its first race was sailed on 14 February of that year. A century on, the squadron celebrated its hundredth birthday in 2024 with a twilight race that put an original 12ft skiff on show, the prizes echoing that first contest. What the modern club does is unusual for Sydney: it runs genuine dinghy sailing for juniors and serious yacht racing for adults out of the same historic boatshed, one of the very few clubs on the harbour catering to both. Sabots and Lasers share the calendar with yachts up to forty feet, weekend racing runs year-round, and Wednesday twilight racing in daylight saving splits the fleet into six colour-coded divisions with a course sheet to match. The newsletter is called "Humbug", after the harbour reach the courses often sail. The squadron's keelboat credentials are contemporary, not nostalgic — club crews Chris O

Sailing club

One suburb, two sailing clubs — and the confusion is understandable. Greenwich Sailing Club at Manns Point, established in 1938, is not the Greenwich Flying Squadron at Bay Street Wharf, founded fourteen years earlier. The distinction is worth making plainly: where the Squadron pairs yacht racing with a Sabot junior program, Greenwich Sailing Club is an amateur off-the-beach dinghy club administered by the sailors themselves alongside their families and friends, with junior sailing at the centre of everything it does. The two neighbours coexist happily, but they are different institutions with different histories. GSC describes itself as friendly and family-oriented, drawing members from all over Sydney, and its rhythm is simple: Sunday-afternoon racing from September to March, with the club open from ten in the morning and briefing around one. The Sunday fleets tell the club's story — Optimists and O'pen Skiffs for the juniors, Flying 11s, Lasers and 29ers further up the age ladder — and a busy social program rounds out the season. Membership spans beginners through to the most competitive racers, and the club reports its sailors regularly compete at state, national and world cha

Sailing club

Inland sailing clubs live and die by their water, and few illustrate that better than Griffith Sailing Club, which runs its season on the western shore of Lake Wyangan in the NSW Riverina, about ten minutes' drive north-west of the city. This is a small, family-oriented, volunteer-run organisation with a broader brief than most: sailing sits alongside kayaking and rowing, making it a genuine multi-sport hub for non-powered water activity in the district. The Australian Sports Foundation has described the club as "a community asset, a meeting place, and a source of connection for families, friends, volunteers and local residents", and that framing fits — when Australian Sailing visited in 2021 it found a well-established club with a friendly family atmosphere and leadership openly keen to grow the membership. The sailing itself centres on off-the-beach dinghies and catamarans, with Sunday afternoon racing from the first of September through to the end of April. Every boat competes on Yardstick handicap, which keeps a mixed fleet racing on level terms regardless of class, and trailer sailors up to six metres are welcome too, launching from the club's own ramp or the neighbouring pub

Sailing club

Parsley Bay at Brooklyn is the kind of place keelboat sailors dream about: a sheltered Hawkesbury River anchorage an hour north of Sydney, with moorings laid in still water and some of the least crowded racing water in New South Wales opening out around the headland. Hawkesbury River Yacht Club has sailed from here since 1992, a mooring-based club of yachts between roughly six and eleven metres, most of them swinging on moorings in Parsley Bay or close by. Trailer sailors and sports yachts are welcome alongside the fixed keels. The club's personality is racing-and-social in equal measure. Its own description of the membership — "from experienced sailors to beginners. All are welcome" — is borne out by a calendar that mixes serious pointscore racing with raft-ups, twilight sails and barbecues, and by the willingness of boat owners to take newcomers aboard as crew. The fleet's character shows in the names on the race documents: Amoeba, Amourette, Aroha Nui, Cecilia, Crossbow, Eikon, Saga and Star of the Sea, a roll call of well-loved club racers rather than grand prix machines. One clarification matters for anyone researching Brooklyn sailing: this club, founded in 1992, is a separ

Sailing club

Dead Horse Bay — known on some charts as Lookout Bay — hides one of Sydney sailing's most enduring youth clubs. Hornsby Ku-ring-gai Sailing Club has operated from this Hawkesbury River shoreline near Brooklyn since 1968, formed specifically to give local children and young people an entry into the sport. More than half a century later the mission statement is unchanged: the club's focus, as the Lower Hawkesbury Aquatic & Recreation Association puts it, has been "learning, development, and fostering a love of our sport in young people", carried entirely by volunteers. Everything about the club runs on parent power. Mums, dads and carers crew the support boats, run the duty rosters, maintain the training fleet and keep the boatshed standing — the club describes itself as run by enthusiastic parent and carer volunteers with a friendly, relaxed atmosphere, and participation by families is an essential part of the model rather than a nice extra. Sailing membership is open to anyone from age eight, beginner or experienced, and newcomers can dip a toe in by crewing or riding a support boat before committing. What gives HKSC its particular flavour is the fleet. Alongside the classic juni

Sailing club

"The little club that can!!!" runs the motto at Hunters Hill Sailing Club, and the three exclamation points are earned. This junior and youth dinghy club at Woolwich, on the lower Parramatta River near the Lane Cove River mouth, has produced five Olympians according to Australian Sailing's club profile, collected the 2018 NSW Sailing Club of the Year award, and sent the largest club contingent to the 2020 Optimist nationals in Victoria — a travelling party of around sixty. All of it comes out of a two-level clubhouse at Clarkes Point, run entirely by volunteers on a council site. The model is unapologetically family-based. Membership covers sailor plus parent, race-day jobs from canteen to duty officer are rostered volunteers, and members are expected to contribute. The numbers show what that buys: 249 members in the 2019/20 season, 121 of them under eighteen — a rebuild from a flat base of around 120 before the club's modern reinvention. The club's stated aim is to foster participation in sailing particularly among youth and family groups, and its leadership talks about the place as somewhere teenagers can safely work out who they are. It's also a club that fights for its water.

Sailing club

Sailing Club in Wollongong, NSW.

Sailing club

Sailing on Lake Illawarra has run through one address for eight decades: 1 Northcliffe Drive, Warrawong, home of the Illawarra Yacht Club and of IYC Sailing Incorporated, the not-for-profit association that runs the sport from the licensed club's foreshore premises. The arrangement is distinctive — a community licensed club with its bistro, function rooms and auditorium providing the roof, while IYC Sailing independently organises the dinghies, trailable yachts, windsurfers and radio-controlled yachts on the water. The club's history reaches back to 1945, and by the Shellharbour historian's reckoning it stands as the Illawarra's oldest sailing club, started four years before neighbouring Oak Flats Sailing Club. This was one of New South Wales's great 16ft skiff strongholds. The club hosted the state championship in 1972, the Inter-Dominion in 1983 and the Australian championship across the Bicentennial summer of 1987–88, and by 1988 it had fourteen skiffs on register alongside trailable yachts, Flying Ants and a sailboard section drawing more than forty starters a race. That multi-discipline character survives: trailable yachts have raced here since 1982 and remain a strong divisi

Sailing club

Callala Bay, on Jervis Bay's northern shore, supports a rare arrangement: one volunteer-built clubhouse sheltering three sailing organisations and an outrigger canoe club. Jervis Bay Cruising Yacht Club is the keelboat and trailable-yacht arm of that community — the cruising counterpart to the dinghy sailors of Jervis Bay Sailing Club — and by its own account it was established in the bay during the 1980s and has grown into a club with a large membership of local boat owners. When the Jervis Bay Sailing Club fields enquiries about moorings and keelboats at Callala Bay, it sends them here, which tells you where the big-boat knowledge sits. The clubhouse at 42 Boorawine Terrace, near the Callala Bay boat ramp, was built entirely by volunteers and is shared with the sailing club, Sailability Callala and the outriggers, a cohabitation that sums up how this corner of the Shoalhaven does its boating: cooperatively, and on a shoestring where necessary. The club runs its administration through an online membership and events platform, keeps its community humming through a social media group, and counts Jervis Bay Brewing Co, Worrigee Sports and the Saltwater Veterans charity among its spo

Sailing club

Spirals, Lasers, NS14s and Tasars line up alongside a Contender, a Finn, Hobie Cats, Paper Tigers, a Hunter 216 and even a VS 15ft skiff — the Saturday afternoon fleet at Jervis Bay Sailing Club is a cross-section of Australian off-the-beach sailing, and that is exactly the point. Many members also double as volunteers with the neighbouring junior sailing school, which gives this small club an unusually strong teaching culture. Based at Callala Bay on the northern shore of Jervis Bay, this is a club built for dinghy and catamaran sailors who want honest, well-run racing without big-club ceremony. Briefings are at noon, racing starts at 1:30 pm, and the season runs from the October long weekend through to the end of May, with a winter Frostbite series on the first Saturday of each month keeping the keenest crews sharp. Three series shape each season: a Championship and a Sprints series, both sailed off scratch starts, and a Pointscore sailed on handicap, so newcomers and old hands each get a genuine shot at silverware. The October Long Weekend Annual Regatta is the traditional curtain-raiser — six races across two days for dinghies, skiffs and multihulls, with entries capped to kee