Brisbane 18 Footers Sailing Club

One class of boat, pursued for well over a century, defines this organisation. Brisbane 18 Footers Sailing Club — which styles itself the city's home for both the modern 18-footer and its heritage skiff cousins — turned one hundred in 2020 and stands as the city's original 18-footer body, affiliated with Australian Sailing. Around the modern 18ft skiff orbit the historical 10ft and 12ft skiffs, boats that keep the class's long memory physically alive on the water.

The club's pedigree is remarkable: by its own historical reckoning, Queensland craft claimed 23 national 18-footer titles up to 1958, and its members and designers repeatedly changed the sport itself — the heel-less Aberdare of the 1930s provoked a schism that created a whole new Sydney league, while the Ben Lexcen-designed Venom ruled the 1961 world titles on the Brisbane River.

The lean decades that followed, as costs and technology favoured the southern fleets, have lately given way to a genuine revival: in January 2025 the club staged the national championship on Waterloo Bay, ending a 35-year absence of the title event from Queensland waters. Today the club operates without a single clubhouse of its own, racing instead from partner squadrons around Moreton Bay and the river, but the mission is precisely what it was in 1920 — keep the 18-footer flying in Queensland, and teach young sailors to handle it.

Membership figures are not published, but the measure of the club is better taken from its boats than its books: a website proudly recounting 125 years of river and bay racing, a heritage fleet that still competes, and a modern squad sailing at world-championship level.

Development here means mentoring, not classroom syllabuses. The modern rebuild has centred on young crews guided by two substantial figures: Dave Hayter, a four-time national 14ft skiff champion, and Rob Brown, a former world champion, with a youth team fronted by Josh Sloman now actively campaigning. No Tackers or Discover Sailing Centre accreditation attaches to the club; grassroots junior sailing in its orbit runs through Brisbane Sailing Squadron at Bulimba Point, leaving the 18 Footers free to concentrate on their speciality — converting talented youngsters into capable skiff sailors.

Fleet-building through design is in the club's DNA: back in 1959 it commissioned Norman Wright Jr and Bob Miller — the latter later famous as Ben Lexcen — to draw a boat expressly to rebuild the club fleet, and the radical three-handed chine skiff Taipan resulted. The present racing program runs in three strands. Modern 18ft skiffs compete on Waterloo Bay, launching from the Darling Point and Royal Queensland squadrons under arrangements dating from 2008.

Historical 10ft and 12ft skiffs keep the heritage fleet racing from Brisbane Sailing Squadron on the river. And hosting rounds out the picture: staging the 2025 nationals on Waterloo Bay returned the championship event to Queensland after 35 years away. Hayter's own 2023 skiff Big Foot Bags & Covers, eighth at the 2024 Giltinan worlds, marks the competitive standard the squad now chases.

For a young sailor weighing the pathway, the appeal is obvious: learn the ropes in dinghies on the river, graduate through the heritage skiffs, and step into one of the fastest monohull classes on the planet with a world champion looking over your shoulder.

Two stretches of water bookend the club's story. For the greater part of its life its clubhouse occupied the Brisbane River bank at Bulimba, looking across to Kingsford Smith Drive on the Hamilton side — a busy tidal reach where 18 footers had raced since the nineteenth century and where champions from Britannia through the Jenny boats honed their craft. That era closed in 2008, when the clubhouse site was relinquished and racing transferred to Waterloo Bay, the open sweep of Moreton Bay off Manly and Wynnum whose steadier breezes and cleaner air suit the modern skiff.

The contemporary fleet sails from two partner bases on the bay — the Darling Point and Royal Queensland squadrons — and Waterloo Bay hosted the national championship decider across 18 to 20 January 2025. The river thread, though, was never cut. The heritage 10ft and 12ft skiffs, together with the junior sailing that feeds the club's future, operate from Brisbane Sailing Squadron at Bulimba Point, barely a stone's throw from the old front door.

The dual arrangement serves the club well: sheltered tidal water saturated with the class's past for the wooden boats, and open bay conditions for the carbon-fibre generation chasing interstate and international honours. Visitors should note there is no single clubhouse gate to knock on; the club's presence is wherever its skiffs are rigging, from Bulimba Point out to the Waterloo Bay start line.

Both environments sit within easy reach of central Brisbane, which is part of the class's enduring appeal here: world-level racing conducted practically within sight of a capital city's suburbs.

The family tree begins in July 1895 with the City of Brisbane Sailing Club, which a year later hosted an interstate 18-footer contest won on home water by the newly built Britannia. Names changed as the organisation matured — Brisbane Flying Squadron from February 1900, Queensland Flying Squadron from August 1905 — before the body was reconstituted in 1920 under its present title, with J. Colin Clark and Lance Watts among the driving forces and a blue-and-red pennant bearing an "18" on its blue field.

The honour board from that period is formidable: Clark's Britannia secured the first official national championship held in Queensland, in 1917–18, and Clark, the Crouch brothers, Watts and ultimately Norman Wright Jr accumulated titles across four decades. Audacity peaked in 1932, when member Frederick Hart engaged builder Alf 'Toby' Whereat to construct Aberdare, the first heel-less seven-foot-beam skiff-type 18 footer. The design convulsed Sydney racing and directly triggered the 1935 birth of the NSW 18 Footers Sailing League.

Vic Vaughan steered the boat — sailors knew her as "the Galloping Ghost" — to four consecutive national crowns, and Queenslanders won 12 of the 15 championships contested between 1934 and 1953. In 1956 Wright's Jenny VI took the world 18-footer crown on Waterloo Bay, a Queensland first; Taipan and Venom then swept the 1961 worlds on the Brisbane River. Neville Buckley's six consecutive state titles in TraveLodge-sponsored boats extended the run into the 1970s before escalating technology costs closed it.

Revival stirred from about 2019 under Dave Hayter and crested in January 2025, when the national championship finally came home to Queensland.