ALLSAIL Sailing Club

Allsail Sailing Club operates from the Ferry Wharf at Church Point on Pittwater (NSW). They run an organised sailing club with a maintained fleet of yachts and catamarans for club sailing, yachtshare options, skippered and bareboat charter, twilight and regatta racing, and organised sailing holidays. The organisation also offers sail training and formal keelboat courses (including International Yacht Training/ICC) for beginners through experienced sailors.

Everything here happens on a yacht, not in a classroom — the club makes a point of it. Its Australian Sailing Keelboat Crew and Helm courses are taught entirely afloat aboard the club's two trainers — the Flying Tiger 10 sports racer and the Bavaria 40S cruising yacht — so a student's first lesson is also their first time handling a proper keelboat under way. Courses run Fridays and Sundays from 11am to 2pm, priced at $890, and an instalment plan is offered.

The pathway is unashamedly aimed at adults who want to go places. As a Discover Sailing Centre and affiliated club, Allsail steers graduates towards the International Certificate of Competence, the qualification needed to charter overseas — which dovetails neatly with the club's annual flotilla holidays in Greek, Croatian and Caribbean waters. For those chasing saltier experience, offshore and "mile maker" cruises deliver night sailing and passage hours along the coast. A Powerboat Course rounds out the offering and counts towards a NSW General Boating Licence.

There is no junior dinghy pathway here, and that is deliberate: this is adult keelboat training with a destination in mind. Graduates don't age out of the system either — membership converts straight into weekly twilight races, regatta entries, cruises and up-the-coast passages on yachts the club supplies and maintains. The result is a training pipeline that starts with someone who has never held a tiller and ends, often enough, with that same person helming a chartered yacht through the Cyclades or contesting the Phuket Bay Regatta with clubmates they met in a Friday session.

Church Point is one of those Sydney addresses sailors know and everyone else drives past. Allsail's office sits directly on the Church Point Ferry Wharf, where the Scotland Island and western foreshore ferries come and go, with council carparks about 100 metres away and a five-minute drop-off zone right outside. It is the working heart of Pittwater, and an entirely appropriate front door for a club whose members step straight off the wharf onto waiting yachts.

The sailing water is Pittwater itself, the broad estuary that opens into Broken Bay at Sydney's northern edge. The club describes it as an unspoilt and spectacular waterway, and its western shore runs hard against the bush of Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, so much of the view from a cockpit is sandstone and eucalypt rather than suburbia. Compared with Sydney Harbour the water is uncrowded, and the bay's abundance of moorings makes overnight stays easy — a genuine cruising ground on the doorstep of a capital city, with anchorages tucked behind headlands in nearly every weather.

From this base the club's boats range across three distinct playgrounds. Inshore, Pittwater hosts the weekly twilight racing and leisurely club cruising. Through the heads, Broken Bay and the Hawkesbury mouth offer bigger water and the start of the up-the-coast passages. Beyond that lies the open Tasman, which members cross on offshore training cruises and, in earlier decades, on passages to Hobart, Hamilton Island and New Caledonia. Few training venues in the country let a student progress from a first Friday lesson to an offshore passage without ever changing clubs.

Mike De Berg started Allsail in 1989 around a gap he saw in the market: people who loved sailing but had no boat. The early fleet mixed J24s with offshore yachts between 35 and 44 feet, and from the beginning the club's horizons were wide — members cruised Pittwater on weekends and made passages to Hobart, Hamilton Island and New Caledonia. In 1996 De Berg added the ingredient that would define the club's culture, taking a flotilla to the Mediterranean and beginning a tradition of annual overseas sailing holidays that continues today.

The club's history reads as a series of handovers, each adding a layer. Graham Friend took ownership in 2003 and brought the Radford 50 Seaquest — a 2005 Rolex Trophy winner — and he also took the club's sailors to the Caribbean for the first time. Russell Waddy had come aboard as a trainee skipper for the 2001 overseas trip, travelling with his wife Cherie, and the pair assumed ownership in 2008, growing the Pittwater Yacht Charter fleet and deepening the regatta and holiday program. In 2022 the Waddys handed the reins over to Trent Lee and eased towards retirement, still expanding the overseas offerings.

The flotilla log alone tells the story of a club that kept moving: Phuket Bay Regattas in 2018, 2019 and 2020, Canada's west coast and Greece in 2018, Croatia and Montenegro plus Tonga in 2019, Sicily and the Aeolian Islands in 2023, a Turkish gulet cruise and a return to Greece in 2024, the French Riviera in June 2025, and the Ionian Islands planned for 2026. Only Covid-19 broke the run, postponing the 2020 Greek trip. The club calls itself a Pittwater fixture since 1989, and three and a half decades of logbooks back the claim.