Hillarys Yacht Club

Introduction

• Hillarys Yacht Club was formed in 1986 and sits at 65 Northside Drive within Hillarys Boat Harbour on Perth’s northern coastline. The club presents itself as a mixed yacht club that runs a wide range of social and competitive boating activities, and operates a two-storey clubhouse with a restaurant, function room and bar overlooking the harbour.

What the club offers

• Keelboat racing each Sunday with separate fleets and a regular Tasar fleet on Saturday mornings.
• A comprehensive junior development pathway starting with Tackers and progressing through Green Fleet, Optimist squads and higher-performance youth squads.
• Adult training and recreational courses, on-water coaching clinics and periodic multi-fleet events and regattas.
• Marina and pen services including fixed and floating pens (total pen field listed as 270 berths), boat lifting and storage, temporary visitor pens and associated compliance inspections.

Facilities and membership focus

• Shoreside facilities include the upper-level restaurant and bar with ocean views, a separate junior clubhouse for training, shower and toilet facilities, dinghy launch facilities and back-of-house service contractors and amenities to support visiting and member vessels.
• The club states a commitment to youth development, family participation and safe, friendly competition alongside broader water-sports activities such as diving, angling, kayaking and paddleboarding.

Practical note

• Pen sizes and availability are listed by the club and include annual rental pens and long-term leases; marina compliance inspections are required before pen occupancy and periodically thereafter.

The depth of the junior pathway is what distinguishes Hillarys. Children can start in Tackers — presented by SunSmart, open to seven-to-twelve-year-olds without club membership, with all equipment provided and Australian Sailing-qualified instructors — and from there the ladder keeps going. Graduates of Tackers 3 move into the Green Fleet development program, sailing Optimists with club Poly Tackers Optimists available to hire, then on to the Optimist Intermediate Squad and ultimately state and national competition pathways.

Teens past Tackers 3 have their own track in the Out There Sailing after-school program, and on Sunday mornings trainee fleets of all ages — Learn to Sail and Bronze fleet — run a nine-week course timed to finish before the afternoon's racing begins.

The club also stages serious coaching events. The Youth Sail WA Westsail Coaching Clinic of 2021 ran at the club from 25 to 28 September, attracting 89 sailors in seven fleets under a dozen high-level coaches. Back at Easter 2018, the inaugural Sail Easter coaching regatta secured two high-profile coaches in Olympic 470 gold medallist Belinda Stowell and WAIS's Ryan Palk, with an entry list topping 50, spread across fleets including the Laser, Bic, Optimist, Tasar, 29er, Mirror and National 125, under commodore Neil Harrison.

Adults are hardly neglected. The keelboat racing division fields around 25 to 30 yachts every Sunday — fortnightly from June to October — divided into fleets for yachts under 30 feet and those over, which means about 60 people afloat each race day. A Tasar fleet races Saturday mornings and hosts WA Tasar winter series events; the club claimed the Club Team trophy when part of the 2015 WA Tasar State Championships was sailed at Hillarys.

Everything happens in and around Hillarys Boat Harbour, the marina development of the late 1980s on Perth's northern coastline that has become one of the city's favourite recreational boating destinations. Racing and coaching take place in semi-protected ocean water off the marina, on the northern as well as the southern side of the harbour — open-sea sailing with the breakwater's shelter close at hand, well suited to teaching juniors who are stepping up from enclosed water, and testing enough to prepare Optimist and Laser sailors for state and national competition.

The harbour geography also shapes a rich keelboat calendar. The club's signature races use the coastline in every direction: the Mindarie and Return and Marmion Reef Race stay local, the Fremantle and Return and Rottnest and Return head south and offshore, and the Fairway Race, Commodore's Cup, Australia Day Race and Mariners and Shepherdess Cups fill out the season. The club hosts the interclub "Pot of Gold" regatta, and its skippers compete in Yachting WA offshore events including blue water contests bound for Geraldton, Carnarvon or Bunbury — so a Hillarys keelboat crew can progress from Sunday club racing to genuine ocean passages without changing clubs.

Shoreside infrastructure matches the scale of the water. The clubhouse offers a restaurant, function room and bar with ocean views on the upper storey; a separate junior clubhouse serves the training programs; and the pen field of 270 on-the-water berths ranges from 8 by 4 metres to 21 by 6 metres, plus catamaran pens, with boat lifting and racking services available. Annual pen rental in the 2026/27 schedule runs from around $6,038 for a small fixed pen to approximately $18,748 for the largest floating berth.

The club's prehistory belongs to the harbour. The Department for Marine and Harbours proposed building Hillarys Boat Harbour in 1983, and members of the Marmion Angling and Aquatic Club responded with a submission seeking additional boat launching facilities. That effort produced the Hillarys Boat Harbour Association in 1985, and the following year association members gathered to formally inaugurate Hillarys Yacht Club Incorporated and elect the club's first office bearers.

The early years were nomadic in a thoroughly Australian way: the committee spent its first three years meeting monthly at two local pubs — the Castle Hotel at North Beach and the Mullaloo Tavern — while plans for a clubhouse and jetties took shape. The breakthrough came in October 1989, when clubhouse plans were finalised, a lease with the Department for Marine and Harbours was signed, and members gained access to 112 boat pens arranged in two jetty rows. The clubhouse itself was constructed in 1990 — meaning the club went from inaugural meeting to permanent waterfront home in barely four years.

From that foundation the club built steadily outward. The pen field grew from those first 112 berths to today's 270, a junior clubhouse was added to serve the expanding training programs, and the burgee — a blue pennant with yellow cross and "H," designed by a member — has required alteration only once in the club's life, a small symbol of institutional continuity.

Milestones since have included the WA Tasar State Championships of 21–22 March 2015, hosted in part at the club, which collected the Club Team trophy; the inaugural Sail Easter coaching regatta in 2018 with Olympic gold medallist Belinda Stowell on the coaching staff; and the 2021 Westsail Coaching Clinic run under the Youth Sail WA banner, which brought 89 young sailors and a dozen high-level coaches to the harbour. For a club younger than most of its keelboats' skippers, the record is remarkably full.