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Sailing club

Dinghies & keelboats in Kiama, NSW.

Sailing club

Dinghy in Kincumber, NSW.

Sailing club

Three quite different sailing tribes share the waterfront at Dover Park, Blakehurst, and all of them call Kogarah Bay Sailing Club home. The first is the dinghy fleet — class racing for Sabres and RS Aeros, plus an Open division that typically fields RS Quests, Herons, Lasers, Sharks and Nacras, with briefings at 1 pm and a 2 pm start in summer shifting an hour earlier through winter. The second is one of the larger Sailability operations in Sydney, taking people with disabilities sailing at minimal cost. The third launches nothing at all: the Kogarah Bay Radio Yacht Club, whose members race International One Metres and other classes from an elevated control area beside the clubhouse, as Associate Members of the parent club. The radio sailors describe their fleet as the largest IOM contingent in Sydney, with membership they rank third among NSW radio-yacht clubs — big claims, but the silverware and national titles hosted here give them weight. The club's own pitch is a friendly place where the whole family can sail and race together, whatever their ages, and the calendar backs the tone. The KBSC Aero Wettie Warmer Winter Series keeps RS Aero sailors racing through the cold months,

Sailing club

Few sailing clubs have reinvented themselves as completely as Koonawarra Bay. Founded in the 1950s as a conventional dinghy and catamaran club on the western shore of Lake Illawarra, it now centres its sailing on two very modern niches: radio-controlled yachts and foiling windsurfers. The radio fleet is the heartbeat — International One Metres racing on Saturdays and Tuesdays, the big A Class boats on Thursdays, everything starting at midday — while the windsurfers bring speed and spectacle when the westerly gets up. The club is quick to note that all classes remain welcome, a holdover from decades in which its members sailed just about everything that floats, from dinghies to the small catamarans the club once owned for members to use. The character is small-scale and welcoming rather than corporate. Commodore Ralph Skea and Secretary Jon Pinkerton head a club affiliated with the NSW Radio Yachting Association, and the membership count isn't published — but the activity level speaks clearly enough, with organised sailing three days a week all year. Midday starts leave the morning free for boat preparation and tuning on the club's big grassed rigging areas, and the elevated point

Sailing club

Catamarans rule the grass at Silver Beach. Kurnell Catamaran Club, on the southern headland of Botany Bay, is Sydney's dedicated off-the-beach multihull club, and its rigging area reads like a catalogue of the breed: Tornados, Taipans, Hobie Cats, NACRAs, F16s and F18s, A Class cats, Maricats, Paper Tigers, Stingrays, Windrush and more, with cruising multihulls and junior monohulls welcome alongside. The club calls itself "a fun, family oriented Club" and says it looks after raw novices and seasoned experts in equal measure; the racing program — most weekends from early September to early May — serves both ends of that range. For a beach cat club, the competitive reach is remarkable. KCC sailors Pete and Bailey Skewes, racing as Team Australia 2, finished second in the 2024 running of the Worrell 1000 — the legendary thousand-mile dash up the American east coast — aboard an F18. Archie Gargett sails the NACRA 17 — the Olympic mixed multihull — alongside crew Sarah Hoffman, and contested the 2026 European Championships, while other members lined up at the F18 World Championships in early 2026. At home, the KCC Top Gun Regatta each November draws the state's cat sailors to Botany Ba

Sailing club

Dinghy in Lake Cargelligo, NSW.

Sailing club

Dinghy in Windang, NSW.

Sailing club

More than 930 metres above sea level, in a town better known for ski racks than spinnakers, Lake Jindabyne Sailing Club runs one of the most charming sailing programs in New South Wales. "We are not a huge club," its own account concedes, "membership is approaching 150... We are however a very happy club" — and membership is rising again through the 2020s. The fleet is built mainly around Lasers, Nacras and Hobie Cats, with other classes joining in; every boat carries an Australian Sailing yardstick, and the Wednesday twilight racing is handicapped on an adjusted basis so that any sailor, in any boat, can take home the weekly Handicap Honours trophy. Turnouts of up to eighteen boats on Wednesday evenings and sixteen on Sundays are healthy numbers for a small mountain town. The season runs from November through April, neatly bookending the ski season: Wednesday twilight sails followed by a barbecue dinner, and Sunday afternoon racing. The signature event is the biennial Snowy Mountains Regatta — three races on Saturday, three on Sunday and an invitation race on Friday evening — which draws visitors from the coast and the capital. Around the sailing runs a volunteer culture that doe

Sailing club

Sailors on the coast sometimes forget that some of the keenest weekend racing in New South Wales happens hundreds of kilometres inland, on an irrigation storage in the Namoi Valley. Lake Keepit Sailing Club has run its racing on Keepit Dam, between Gunnedah and Tamworth, since 1960, and it carries the easy self-confidence of a club that knows exactly what it is: a friendly inland fleet where, as the club puts it, people from every walk of life find the companionship of like-minded sailors hard to beat. The racing itself is handicapped across an unusually broad spread of craft, from high-performance sports boats at one end of the yardstick table to cruising trailerable yachts at the other. Light-air specialists tend to thrive here, because Keepit's breezes reward patience and local knowledge rather than brute power. Visitors are welcome to turn up on any Sunday and have a go, and members enjoy standing access to club boats for cruising the dam. One fixture defines the club's year above all others: the Keepit Kool Regatta, staged every June long weekend since the late 1960s and drawing crews from across New South Wales and Queensland. Recent editions have attracted Lasers, NS15s, a

Sailing club

On a lake that supports half a dozen sailing clubs, Lake Macquarie Yacht Club makes the boldest claim of any of them: it describes itself as "the oldest and largest sailing club outside metropolitan Sydney", a boast it rests on continuous operation since 1929 and the scale of its membership and fleet. Whatever the scoreboard says, the substance is hard to argue with — a member-owned, family-orientated club on absolute waterfront at Belmont Bay, running a year-round racing calendar from a clubhouse with a bar and restaurant and its own marina. This is fundamentally a keelboat club, and the racing reflects it. Competitive fleets of yachts from 30 to 50 feet sail through the year, with a non-spinnaker division keeping the door open for crews who prefer their racing without the extra sail-handling. Midweek and twilight racing sit alongside Sunday fixtures, and the program runs to a Cruising Division, the Windwarriors group and a dedicated women's sailing arm in SheSails. The club also carries an offshore tradition it is clearly proud of, crediting its members with "conquests in every major race on Australia's east coast". The membership spans keelboats and off-the-beach dinghies, and

Sailing club

Dinghy in Carcoar, NSW.

Sailing club

Every Saturday from September through April, as many as eighty skiffs and dinghies pour off the point at Longueville and fan out across the Lane Cove River toward the upper harbour. That weekly spectacle belongs to the Lane Cove 12ft Sailing Skiff Club, a not-for-profit community club run entirely by volunteers — sailors, families and supporters numbering close to 400 — which has occupied the same patch of foreshore beside Longueville Wharf since 1918. As the name insists, the 12ft skiff is the beating heart of the place: a two-person, high-performance racing dinghy at the centre of a fiercely contested Sydney–Brisbane–New Zealand scene that culminates each summer in the Interdominion for the Silasec Trophy. Lane Cove is one of three Sydney clubs keeping that class alive, and its sailors sit at the sharp end of it. Gladesville sailor Nick Press has steered his way to a record-equalling eight Interdominion titles as skipper — a tally later reports lifted to nine — many of them with crew Andrew Hay, and their boat Sail Inc. took the 2025 NSW Championship. Press's father Murray still races a twelve-footer for the club, and David Winning — scion of the celebrated Winning sailing famil

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

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

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

Mixed in Merimbula, NSW.

Sailing club

Few Sydney clubs wear their speciality as openly as the skiffies of Middle Harbour. "Skiff sailing is the heart and soul of our Club," the members say, and with a 16ft skiff fleet they describe as one of the strongest in Australia, the claim carries weight. Founded at The Spit in 1902 — which, the club notes, makes it the longest established club in Mosman — this is where the great Australian skiff tradition meets a thoroughly modern junior pathway, and where a junior starting at age six can plausibly finish up racing in the bow of a 16-footer. The 16ft skiff itself is a serious piece of equipment: a high-performance carbon racing machine with a three-person crew, two on trapeze and a large masthead asymmetrical spinnaker. Alongside it races the 13ft skiff, the club's affordable entry-level skiff, favoured by youth sailors mostly aged thirteen to twenty-three, which takes to the water on Saturdays shortly after the 16s. The club also hosted the NSW 16ft and 13ft State Championships in November 2025. Off the water, the club runs a licensed bar and bistro at 237 Spit Road, Mosman, hosts weddings and events from its Deck Bar with water views, and brands its functions as "Skiffies Ev

Sailing club

One class, raced properly, by people who own their boats and turn up — that is the essence of Middle Harbour Amateur Sailing Club, known simply as "The Laser Club". From its base on Lower Parriwi Road at The Spit, Mosman, the club sails only the ILCA dinghy (the boat formerly known as the Laser), fielding ILCA 4, ILCA 6 and ILCA 7 rigs so that sailors of different weights and abilities race on level terms. It welcomes younger and older adults alike, and the culture is built on what the club calls active participation: generally, every member owns an ILCA and sails on race days. There are no paid staff. The clubhouse, the racing and the social calendar are run and maintained entirely by members, whose volunteer contribution is explicitly expected and valued. Commodore Chris Kelleway has framed the club as a local community organisation encouraging adults to build health and fitness through sailing — Laser racing, he notes, can easily keep you in the top decile of your age group fitness-wise. The club's masters culture is a point of pride: a team of members travelled to the 2026 ILCA Masters World Championship at Kalamaki, Athens, and Nick Alexander took the ILCA 7 Masters division

Sailing club

Member yacht club at The Spit with a 103-berth floating marina and 9 swing moorings, mostly allocated to members and race boats; visitors welcome with bar and bistro.

Sailing club

Dinghy in Mollymook, NSW.

Sailing club

Dinghy (Opti/ILCA) in Mona Vale, NSW.

Sailing club

Keelboats & dinghies in Narooma, NSW.