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Sailing club

Ask a Sydney sailor of a certain vintage about "CAGS" and they'll know exactly where you mean: the Concord, Abbotsford, Gladesville Flying Squadron, as this club was known from 1937, and the spiritual home of twelve-foot skiff sailing on the Parramatta River. Today it trades as the Abbotsford 12ft Sailing Club, but the character has survived every name change since 1936 — a family-oriented, member-run river club where involvement in working bees and race duties keeps fees within reach of ordinary families. The racing menu tells you who the club serves. Juniors start in Optimists and Sabots, a strong Laser division carries sailors through their teens and beyond, Cherubs bridge the gap for the ambitious, and at the top of the pyramid sit the twelve-foot skiffs themselves, the class around which the whole club was built. An Open class keeps the door wide for any other monohull dinghy that turns up. The club also hosts the Parramatta River Championship for 12ft skiffs, a fixture on the NSW circuit, and its current roster includes the father-and-son pairing of Peter and Steve Hill sailing Arrogant Frog. Ties to the neighbourhood run deep. The club works closely with the Abbotsford Sea

Sailing club

Most sailing clubs assume you already own a boat; Allsail was built for everyone who doesn't. Founded at Church Point in 1989, it runs on a simple commercial promise — the club supplies the yachts, members simply enjoy them — with no capital outlay, no marina berth and no long-term commitment required. A single annual or monthly payment lets members sail and race club boats every week of the year, while Gold and Platinum tiers add what the club calls a "non-equity yachtshare": 24 days a year of private use of its 12-metre yachts. The membership is a genuine mixture of cruisers, racers and students, and testimonials describe an atmosphere that welcomes complete beginners as readily as old hands. What sets Allsail apart from a conventional club is the social calendar's reach. Since founder Mike De Berg launched annual overseas flotillas in 1996, members have sailed together through the Mediterranean, Croatia and Montenegro, Tonga, Thailand's Phuket Bay Regatta, Canada's west coast, Sicily, Turkey and the French Riviera, with the Ionian Islands next on the itinerary. Closer to home there is twilight racing, regatta entries and up-the-coast passages. By its own account the operation

Sailing club

Few entries in any Australian club directory come with a crew list drawn entirely from the Australian Army. By its own charter the Army Sailing Club exists to grow the sport within the service, and it frames sailing squarely in military terms: a vehicle for the Army values of Courage, Initiative, Respect and Teamwork. Membership is open to all serving Defence members, Regular or Reserve, and crews are always current serving soldiers, many bringing extensive operational experience to the rail of the club yacht. The club sails from Rushcutters Bay on Sydney Harbour, and it sells the posting-to-Sydney proposition simply: a fun twilight sail after work on what it calls the most beautiful harbour in the world. But the club's real identity is offshore. Its yacht Rising Sun — by the club's description, the only yacht the Army owns — contests passages up and down the east coast, and the 2025 Rolex Sydney Hobart entry doubled as a floating training ground, rotating roughly sixty soldiers through five offshore passages linking Sydney and Melbourne — a first taste of life at sea for most of them. The purpose runs deeper than racing results. Sailing here is adventure training: a way to build

Sailing club

On Sydney Harbour, the eighteen-foot skiff is the fastest ticket in town, and the Australian 18 Footers League at Double Bay is its headquarters. This is not a learn-to-sail club; it is an elite racing organisation devoted to a single spectacular class, in a sport that traces back to Mark Foy's first harbour races of 1892. The League brands its racing as "Formula One on water", and with naming-rights sponsored skiffs since the 1960s and professional live video coverage of every race since the early 2000s, the comparison is less fanciful than it sounds. Spectating is part of the club's DNA. Every Sunday in season a spectator ferry follows the modern fleet around the harbour, continuing a "floating grandstand" concept Foy himself pioneered; in the 1930s up to seven ferries a race trailed the fleet, and an estimated 10,000 people watched the 1979 World Championship from the shore. The clubhouse beside Double Bay Public Wharf, with its rigging lawn alongside, is the operational heart of it all. The club's character is bound up with its personalities and its fierce trans-Tasman rivalry. President John 'Woody' Winning — a JJ Giltinan world champion himself in 2000 — has led the club fo

Sailing club

Jimmy Spithill won the first race he ever sailed, and he won it here — a Manly Junior event at Avalon Sailing Club on Pittwater. The club tells that story with justifiable satisfaction, and by its own account its graduates have represented Australia at the Olympics, the America's Cup, the Admiral's Cup, SailGP, the Sydney Hobart and the Fastnet. Gordon Ingate, Bill Northam, David Forbes and Ken Hudson all passed through the club in its early decades. Yet the place wears its pedigree lightly: the stated purpose is simply "to foster the love of sailing on the waters of Pittwater", with an ethos that puts encouragement, teaching and enjoyment first. Avalon is a family club in the truest sense. Children from around six sail on Sunday mornings while adults take over the water in the afternoons in centreboards and yachts, and everyone is rostered for volunteer duties at least twice a season — canteen, deck or on-water support. The social calendar runs to monthly barbecues on the deck, cruises, picnics and dinners, and there's even a club library of sailing books run on the honour system. The fleet spans an unusual breadth. Centreboard sailors race Manly Juniors, Flying 11s, Spirals, La

Sailing club

"Balmain is the birthplace of sailing for fun in Australia" — the claim comes from the club itself, but the history behind it is solid. The original club formed in 1885 among the shipwrights, sailmakers and watermen of the working harbour, men who cast aside snobbery and elitism and invented an egalitarian, grass-roots style of sailing. Balmain fleets pioneered the over-canvassed open skiffs built to a single length rule — the forerunners of today's 18, 16, 14 and 12-foot classes and, through them, of the Olympic 49er. They were also the first to admit women as skippers and crews, and to embrace sponsorship, betting and prize-money racing. The modern club, re-established in 1995 down at the foot of Water Street in Birchgrove, keeps that spirit deliberately. It calls itself Sydney's friendliest sailing club, and the numbers suggest a healthy appetite: more than seventy boats in the Friday twilight races, around thirty on summer Sundays, and sixty or more in the West Harbour Winter Series. Membership sat around 500 as of 2009, and the club remains open to new members — active sailors plus community members who simply enjoy drinks or a meal at the waterfront. The club's marquee even

Sailing club

Two teenagers founded this club at the end of the Second World War, and both went on to become giants of Australian sailing. Bob Oatley, aged 17, and 19-year-old Bill Buckle pulled together the club that became the Balmoral 12ft Sailing Club in 1945; Oatley would later win Sydney Hobarts with his supermaxis, and both men received Yachting Australia Lifetime Achievement Awards in 2015. Their little beach club, meanwhile, grew into something they might not have predicted — by its own claim, the home of the largest RS Aero and Windsurfer fleets in Australia. The club today is entirely volunteer-run and works hard at being accessible. There is no joining fee, members under thirty pay half the over-30 rates for membership and racking, and visitors can race free on a Temporary SailPass — windsurfers pay $20 a race day, credited towards membership if they join. The class mix is eclectic: Tasars, National Es and Mirrors among the two-handers, Scows, foiling Moths and Contenders among the single-handers, plus the signature Aeros and boards. Racing runs on Saturdays from September to April, with twilight casual racing on Thursday evenings during daylight saving and boards and Aeros out on

Sailing club

Around seventy members, roughly six boats on the line in a typical bay race — and yet, as Vice Commodore Lachlan Brown puts it, for that number of members it's a very active club. Batemans Bay Sailing Club is the small, committed heart of sailing on the Eurobodalla coast, a volunteer outfit whose members simply love sailing on Batemans Bay and Coila Lake, in Brown's words, and who have kept racing on both, most weeks of the year, since 1974. The club's character comes from covering two kinds of sailing at once. Keelboats race on Batemans Bay and the Clyde River, while an off-the-beach program for trailable dinghies and multihulls has run for almost fifty years, much of it now based on Coila Lake near Tuross Head. Racing and cruising sailors share the club equally, and the calendar stretches through winter with a series the club calls "Champagne sailing". The signature event is the d'Albora Batemans Bay Marina Regatta, a two-day fixture staged annually on the weekend nearest Anzac Day. It draws competitors from interstate in off-the-beach dinghies, trailer sailers and catamarans — some chasing state and national titles — and it anchors the club's place on the regional NSW program.

Sailing club

Few volunteer-run dinghy clubs anywhere in the country can point to a honour roll like the one at Bayview Yacht Racing Association. From its beachfront base on the southern shore of Pittwater, BYRA has produced Moth world champions Emmett Lazich, Mark Thorpe, Rob Brewer and brothers Steve and Stuart Shimeld, along with Laser great Brett Beyer — a striking return for a family club that rigs on grass and launches off soft sand. Yet the mood is deliberately unpretentious. BYRA describes its ambition as being the most fun, inclusive and dynamic club on Pittwater, and its own catchcry — that the club is about community as much as sport — is backed up by social, water sports and affiliate membership categories kept affordable through volunteer labour. It is a club where a world champion might be rigging beside a first-season junior, and both are equally at home. Racing is the club's backbone, as the name promises. Lasers, Spirals, Flying Elevens, Manly Juniors and Optimists have filled recent start lines, and Sunday afternoons bring Combined Fleet Racing alongside the other Pittwater clubs. The calendar revolves around two occasions with genuine personality. Each May the Peter Loft Mara

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

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

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

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

Keelboats & dinghies in Burrinjuck, NSW.

Sailing club

There is no mains electricity at Carcoar Dam Sailing Club — not a single 240-volt outlet — and the members would have it no other way. The clubhouse on the shore of Carcoar Dam, in the Central West between Orange and Blayney, runs entirely off-grid on a septic system, with hot showers, a kitchen, a barbecue and a camping ground for visiting sailors, all wrapped in native bush overlooking the water. It calls itself, without a flicker of irony, a humble club, and the friendly, family atmosphere draws its almost sixty members from Orange, Blayney, Bathurst and the wider Central West. As the only sailing club in the Blayney shire and the home base of Sailability Central West, it carries a community responsibility well beyond its size. The sailing itself is gloriously unpretentious. Racing and social cruising share every Sunday through the warmer months, and the fleet takes all comers — catamarans and monohulls, dinghies through to trailer-sailors. The Club Championship plays out across Spring, Summer and Autumn series, and the season is bookended by rituals that tell you everything about the place: a Santa visit at the December sail, and a twilight barbecue and bonfire where champions

Sailing club

Dinghy in Gosford, NSW.

Sailing club

Few sailing clubs owe their entire venue to a sand quarry. Chipping Norton Lake, in Sydney's south-west near Warwick Farm racecourse, was carved out by extensive sand mining between the 1960s and the 1980s, then landscaped with native vegetation as passive-recreation parkland — and since 1995 its flat freshwater reaches have been home to Chipping Norton Lake Sailing Club, a community, family and social club that races from the Lakes Boat Shed at Angle Park. The atmosphere is deliberately easygoing: the club describes itself as a very social club in which every race-day afternoon concludes with a barbecue and hot or cold drinks, a ritual that doubles as an important fundraiser. Income comes solely from membership fees, sailing fees and the canteen, which keeps the place honest and the welcome genuine. Inclusivity is the operating principle. Any class of small craft is welcome, from catamarans to small trailer sailors, all racing together in open handicap, and the club fields an Access dinghy for sailors with disabilities alongside Sailability activity on the lake. The racing calendar is substantial for a volunteer club — around thirty-five Saturday races a year across three short s

Sailing club

Grafton has two sailing organisations, and Clarence River Sailing Club is the one that launches dinghies and catamarans from beside the Grafton Bridge. By the club's own account it was the first sailing club on the Clarence River, and it has raced on that broad Northern Rivers waterway continuously since 1944 — a remarkable run for a volunteer outfit that has had to rebuild its clubhouse twice, once after a flood literally washed its first shed away and again after the March 2000 flood collapsed the roof of its successor under accumulated silt. The sailing is unapologetically grass-roots. Saturday afternoons from September through April, with racing from 1.00pm, the fleet spreads across the river: Hobie 18s, Arrows, Cadets and Mosquitos on the catamaran side, Lasers filling out the monohull ranks, and Open Bics carrying the juniors. The mix reflects a club that has always followed the classes its members actually want to sail rather than chasing trends — cats were admitted on trial back in 1964 and have ebbed and flowed ever since, picking up again from 2012. This is a town club in the best sense. Local businesses donated to the 1947 shed build, members supplied the labour, and t

Sailing club

Where Grafton's other sailing club launches dinghies off the beach, Clarence River Yacht Club is the town's keelboat and trailer-sailer home — the organisation for people who want to race a yacht on a big river and then point the bow downstream for a hundred kilometres of cruising water. The two clubs are complementary rather than rival: the council's own open-space planning treats them as distinct tenants of the Grafton foreshore, with Big River Sailing Club at Harwood Island completing the picture further downstream. The rhythm of the sailing week was recounted on the Ocean Sailing Podcast in 2016 by visitor Andrew Randell: twilight racing weekly, competitive racing roughly every second Sunday, and a very big regatta every Easter. Around a dozen yachts turned out on a typical race day at that time, drawn from a pool of 25 to 30 boats — a healthy strike rate for a regional club. The Easter regatta has become entwined with Grafton's Highland Festival period, and recent council sports committee minutes record it as a success. Cruising is as much the point as racing. Club boats have sailed down to Yamba for Australia Day, and the club leans into the camaraderie side of the sport —

Sailing club

Every autumn, ocean racing yachts slide across a finish line laid in open water outside Coffs Harbour, and the town's yacht club is waiting for them. Coffs Harbour Yacht Club — "The Coffs Yachtie" to locals — is where the Pittwater to Coffs Harbour Yacht Race finishes each year, one of the country's major offshore classics, and that role says everything about the club's dual personality: a community dinghy club on a sheltered harbour that also knows exactly how to welcome a fleet of exhausted ocean racers. The 2022 race weekend even came with its own signature "Pittwater Pizza" and a rum cocktail christened "The Pittwater". The club has just been through a significant reinvention. Until March 2026 the venue traded as a bar and bistro, but when a potential investor pulled out of a site redevelopment, the board pivoted the organisation back toward community sailing. The City of Coffs Harbour, as Crown Land manager, took over the first floor and its commercial opportunities, while the club kept the ground floor and surrounds for sailing. Commodore John Wait framed the fresh direction as a chance to concentrate on growing competitive ocean sailing, regattas and recreational sailing —

Sailing club

Eighty years on the Parramatta River, and the family album is still filling. Concord & Ryde Sailing Club celebrated that milestone in 2025, and the club describes itself as "one of the most established sailing clubs in Sydney" — a claim that holds up when you consider that some families have put three generations into a single race. The first member of the club's Cadet Division, formed back in 1964, was still racing here in 2021, which tells you something about the place's grip on its people. This is a Saturday dinghy club through and through, based in Bennelong Park at Putney on the river's northern foreshore. The culture the club articulates is built around camaraderie on and off the water, friendly competition, and sailing it describes as economical, eco friendly and fun — there's no poker machine in the building and no licensed bar, just a canteen selling lunch and drinks when the clubhouse opens at 9:00am on Saturdays from September to April. The inter-generational texture is the distinguishing feature. Grandparents who learned in Manly Juniors in the 1960s now watch grandchildren rig Optimists on the same stretch of river. Community engagement extends beyond sailing, too: t

Sailing club

On a bend of the Georges River between Tom Uglys Bridge and Oatley, Connells Point Sailing Club has been sending dinghies out on Saturday afternoons for 87 years. It is a family-based, volunteer-run racing club in the classic Sydney mould — the kind of place whose own history dwells affectionately on stories of "heroic sailing days, 'rapid learning episodes' and embarrassing incidents on the water". The breadth of the fleet is the first thing a visitor notices. Racing each Saturday from September to April — briefing at 1:15pm, starts at 2pm — the club fields Lasers across their full, Radial and 4.7 rigs, plus Sabres, Weta trimarans, Optimists, Mirrors, Herons and Pacers, with an Open division that welcomes anything else that floats. The Sabre fleet alone is sailed by members from 14 to 80 years of age, a span that says plenty about who this club is for. Races run about an hour and a half to two hours with safety boat cover on the water. The club's junior energy centres on the Optimist, and it has form here: an Optimist regatta in 2016 and team-racing and training events like the 2017 Opti TT punctuate the photo galleries. That investment recently paid off at the top level, when H

Sailing club

Dinghy in Coonabarabran, NSW.