Australian 18 Footers League

The Australian 18 Footers League is a sailing club based at 77 Bay Street, Double Bay (Sydney Harbour). The club organises and promotes 18-foot skiff racing (season calendars, race results and event galleries), provides membership, hosts on-site hospitality including a bar, café and dining/function facilities, sells spectator ferry tickets for race viewing, and maintains a training register. The site also includes a menu item for Moorings and club contact details (phone and email listed on the website).

The League's pathway begins at other clubs. As an elite single-class racing organisation it runs no learn-to-sail program at all; instead it sits at the apex of a development pyramid, recruiting sailors who have already proven themselves in junior dinghies and the 12ft skiff clubs dotted around the harbour. John 'Woody' Winning and John Winning Jr, for instance, are both products of the Vaucluse Amateur 12ft Sailing Club — the classic route into the eighteens.

The club does actively cultivate that feeder system. It hosted the 63rd 12ft Skiff Interdominion Championship — Australia versus New Zealand — on Sydney Harbour in January 2026, keeping close ties with the class that supplies so many of its crews. Within the club, the season from October to around Easter is built on Sunday racing: short-course series and club championship events that keep teams sharp between the major regattas. The ultimate prize is the JJ Giltinan Trophy, the world championship of the class, which the League has administered since 1938 and which now draws entries from more than twenty countries.

Two adjacent programs round out the picture. The historical 18s — replicas of 1910s-to-1950s-style boats established in 1999 with John Winning's involvement — race with the Sydney Flying Squadron on Saturdays, preserving the class's heritage in afloat form. And the SailMedia operation, the creation of John and Kerrie Winning together with the late Bob Killick, delivers professional live coverage of all racing, which functions as a development tool in its own right: young crews can study the world's best skiff sailors from the commentary boat's-eye view. For a sailor with ambition, the League is where Australian skiff racing's ladder tops out.

The clubhouse stands at Double Bay beside the public ferry wharf, with a rigging area alongside — a compact, purposeful base that puts eighteen-foot skiffs on the water within minutes of arriving. The site has a remarkable backstory: homeless for its first two decades, the League secured the land in the late 1950s, when the skipper Alf Beashel — a Sydney County Council draftsman — took early retirement and spent his superannuation buying the old Ireland Boat Shed site. The clubhouse opened in 1961 and was rebuilt in 1991 under president Tony Reynolds.

The sailing water is Sydney Harbour, and the eighteens use all of it. Sunday racing in season takes the fleet through the harbour's famous wind lanes — the working breezes off the eastern suburbs, the shifts under the Heads, the tactical lottery of a harbour full of ferries and moored yachts. The class was born on this water in 1892, and no other stretch of Australian water carries so much continuous racing history. The spectator ferry that follows each Sunday's racing gives the venue a theatre-like quality: nowhere else in the country can the public watch elite racing from a floating grandstand as a matter of weekly routine.

Double Bay's position on the harbour's southern shore also suits the club's international calendar. The JJ Giltinan Championship has been contested here since 1938 — interrupted only by wartime and occasional overseas editions, including regattas the League supported in the United States and Europe from the 1960s — and the harbour's summer nor'easters provide the brisk, honest conditions the class demands. For visiting crews from Auckland, Britain or America, racing the JJs on Sydney Harbour remains the defining experience of the skiff world.

The League was born in a split. In 1935, when the Sydney Flying Squadron banned the new seven-foot-beam "heel-less" eighteen-footers such as Bob Cuneo's The Mistake, a group of competitors broke away to form the NSW 18 Footers (Sailing) League, with rugby league entrepreneur James Giltinan organising the meeting. The new club's opening event — Race 1 of the 1934-35 Australian Championship on 3 February 1935 — was run jointly with the Brisbane 18 Footers Sailing Club and won by Brisbane's Aberdare. Racing on Sundays while the Squadron kept Saturdays, the League drew enormous crowds — and gambling money — with up to seven spectator ferries per race before the war.

Giltinan, the League's first president, conceived a world championship for the class to mark Sydney's 150th anniversary. The first World 18 Footer Championship, for what became the JJ Giltinan Trophy, was held in 1938: four New Zealand boats faced seventeen Australians, Bert Swinbourne's Taree won, and some 8,000 spectators watched the opening heat. Auckland hosted 1939, where a protest row saw Swinbourne refuse to hand over the trophy until 1946.

The decades since brought a Double Bay home in 1961, eight consecutive world titles from 1964 to 1971 during the TraveLodge sponsorship era — a 17-year partnership that claimed six world championships — and a 1970s golden age of Bruce Farr designs and three-handed boats. Rule changes in 1993, modelled on Julian Bethwaite's AAMI, opened the class to the world: JJ winners have since come from the UK, the USA and New Zealand, and the first all-female teams contested in 2013. Through it all the club has kept Giltinan's dream alive, with the Winning Group backing every championship since 2007.