Chelsea Yacht Club

Some clubs race; some clubs teach; Chelsea Yacht Club has spent more than eighty years refusing to choose between the two. Set directly on the Chelsea foreshore on Port Phillip's eastern shore, about forty minutes south-east of Melbourne, it is an off-the-beach dinghy and catamaran club where the clubhouse doors open straight onto the sand and kayakers, paddle boarders, windsurfers and swimmers share the membership categories with the racing fleet.

The numbers behind the sailing are striking: sailors flying Chelsea colours have, by the club's own tally, accumulated two world crowns, 46 national titles and 130 Victorian championships. The most famous name attached is John Bertrand — the Australia II skipper, Olympic Finn bronze medallist and two-time Etchells world champion — who began here aged seven as a cadet alongside his brother Lex, and who holds Extraordinary Membership to this day. Yet the club's modern identity is as much social as competitive.

Growth has been steady over recent years, a part-time paid club manager was appointed in 2019, and the calendar mixes racing with community dinners, live "music at the beach" sessions and functions in a room overlooking the bay. Signature events show the same breadth: the Four Of A Kind inter-class regatta with three decades behind it, an International Women's Day Regatta requiring at least one woman aboard every boat, and the Chelsea Classic for vintage and veteran dinghies and cats.

It amounts to a club that takes its sailing seriously and itself lightly — a combination that has clearly worked for generations of bayside families.

Where Chelsea genuinely stands apart is in the reach of its teaching. Beyond the usual club members, the club runs programs for primary and secondary students, specialist schools and community organisations — an outward-facing training operation that treats the beach as a public asset rather than a members' preserve. Delivery sits under a fully accredited Discover Sailing Program staffed by Australian Sailing qualified instructors, and the course menu is wide: Tackers for the youngest sailors, Start Sailing and Better Sailing for those building skills, Better Racing for the competitive-minded, SheSails for women, OutThere Sailing for teenagers, and Power Boat Handling for those going the other way.

The ambition stretches further still, with plans to expand the Discover Sailing Centre toward year-round operation spanning sailing, windsurfing, paddling and foiling. The pathway has genuine continuity behind it, too — Lex Bertrand, a member for seventy years, an Olympic coach and the recipient of the club's inaugural Significant Contribution Award, still helps run the Saturday learn-to-sail sessions. Racing then absorbs the graduates.

The season runs October to April with Saturday as the traditional race day, and the classes on the water reflect every stage of development: Optimists for juniors, Pacers for training and club racing, and Javelin, Sabre, Impulse, Laser, RS Aero and RS100 for the one-design sailors, with Windsurfers alongside. The club's own Pacer fleet is put to work at the International Women's Day Regatta so that women without a boat can still compete. Plans to expand social, winter and weekday sailing suggest the schedule will only broaden.

For a bayside family, the practical upshot is a complete ladder — first lesson to state championship — within one small, well-drilled club.

Chelsea's clubhouse stands on the foreshore at the end of Kelvin Grove, and its defining physical fact is that there is nothing between the building and the water but sand. This is a pure off-the-beach operation: boats are rigged on the beach and hand-launched into Port Phillip, with no marina, no travel lift and no moorings to manage. The bay here behaves as eastern Port Phillip generally does — a broad, relatively shallow expanse where summer afternoons bring a workable sea breeze and the fetch is long enough to reward good upwind work without producing dangerous seas for dinghies and beach cats.

Members talk of sunsets over the water and dolphins visiting the shoreline, and the beach doubles as a community asset for the kayakers, board paddlers and swimmers the club also serves. Because beach storage is finite, the club has been inventive: alongside boat and board storage at the foreshore building it operates a "Boat Hub", an undercover space for storage and boat maintenance housed in an industrial estate a few minutes away in Chelsea Heights — a practical answer to a constraint every beach club knows.

The clubhouse itself is a substantial multi-storey building, refurbished in recent years with lift access and accessible toilets, and containing a function space called The Bay Room overlooking the water, a members' lounge, commercial kitchen, licensed bar and a beach-front deck, with facilities open Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights and a large car park alongside. For visiting sailors the arithmetic is simple: tow the dinghy, rig on the sand, launch off the beach, and be racing within sight of the clubhouse balcony.

Few Melbourne clubs offer a shorter distance between car park and start line.

The club's own account fixes its founding to a meeting on 24 March 1938, when about twenty people gathered, elected the first officers and committee that same night, and placed ten yachts on the register — a roll call that says everything about the era: a VJ named Vyres, the 18-foot punt San Loo, the 18-footer Tom Thumb, the 10-footer Sea Chal, and two canvas canoes fitted with sails.

The idea had taken shape the previous year among a circle of people teaching themselves to sail on the bay, and remarkably the club has remained on the same Chelsea foreshore site ever since — more than eight decades of continuity on one patch of sand. The Bertrand brothers thread through the post-war decades: John and Lex won Sabot and Vaucluse Junior championships as Chelsea cadets, and in 1968, sailing the Lightweight Sharpie V93 "Triad" with Peter Evans, they won the Australian championship on their own club's water.

John went on to Olympic bronze and the America's Cup; Lex stayed, accumulating seventy years of membership, a career as an Olympic coach, and the club's inaugural Significant Contribution Award. The clubhouse has been modernised in stages, with recent major works installing lift access and accessible toilets and upgrading the function room, members' area, kitchen, bar and the deck facing the beach.

The strategic turn of recent years dates from 2019, when the club appointed its first paid part-time manager and set a direction built on growing membership, widening participation and becoming more open and accessible — an approach that brought national attention when Australian Sailing featured Chelsea as its Club in Focus in August 2021. Through it all the tally has kept climbing: two world, 46 national and 130 Victorian championships won by sailors flying Chelsea colours.