Mount Martha Yacht Club

Off-the-beach sailing is the whole game at Mount Martha, and the club wears that identity plainly. Its declared aim is fostering sailing in Mount Martha and the surrounding districts, and it goes about it as an inclusive, family-oriented operation where kayaks and stand-up paddleboards share the yard with racing dinghies all year round. This is a club built for people who like their sailing simple: rig on the grass, launch off the sand, race, pack up, go home salty.

That straightforward character has not stopped it hosting serious events. The RS Aero class, one of the fastest-growing single-handed dinghies in the country, has made the club something of a Victorian home base — state championships in 2020, an RS Aero Day in December 2021, and the 2024 Australian national championship, which drew more than 50 boats. The 2026 International Flying Dutchman Victorian titles are also on the club's calendar, and Flying Ants appear in local results alongside the Aeros. Each summer the cruising division of Blairgowrie's Petersville Regatta finishes its 23-mile second day off Mount Martha beach.

Membership is priced accessibly — $145 for juniors in 2025-26, $610 for a family — and the season runs September to August. The clubhouse is not available for private hire, a small detail that says something about priorities: this place exists for sailing first, socialising second and weddings never. Under Commodore Ian Gould, it stays focused on getting locals, especially women and children, out on Port Phillip. Joining is straightforward enough — a $310 joining fee, then annual subscriptions — and the membership year runs from the start of September through to the end of August.

The program that has most reshaped this club in recent years is Women on Water. Launched in 2017 by the club's SheSails representative, Roellen Gillmore, it pulled more than 100 local women into initial Come Try days — roughly four in five of them not yet members. The follow-through has been just as deliberate: female-only sailing days, stand-up paddleboard sessions, Sunday Ladies Social Sailing and twilight outings using club boats. What began as a recruitment push has become a standing part of club life and a case study circulated by SheSails nationally.

Junior development runs the recognised Australian Sailing ladder: Tackers 1, 2 and 3 for seven-to-twelve-year-olds in OziOptis (a 16-hour Tackers 1 course costs $300 for members, $350 for visitors), then Start Sailing 1 and 2, a seven-session Better Sailing transition program on November and December Sundays, and into Green Fleet racing. Less experienced sailors — children, women and men alike — get supported water time on Friday evenings and Sunday mornings from November through to March. The club also supports Duke of Edinburgh's Award participants through sailing and membership.

Racing itself is the club's finishing school. Sunday afternoon racing at 2 pm anchors October and November, Wednesday twilight sailing runs December through March, and the calendar strings together series named Icebreaker, Spring, Twilight, Summer, Autumn, Easter and Winter, plus the Christmas/New Year fixture and a Club Championship. One-off events — the Montgomery & Richards Cup, Safety Beach and Mussel Farm Challenges, Balcombe Point Trophy and the Stern Chaser — keep the season varied.

The clubhouse stands on the Esplanade at the northern end of Mount Martha's southern beach, immediately alongside the Mount Martha Life Saving Club, on the Mornington Peninsula's Port Phillip shoreline. It is an honest beach-sailing venue: no marina, no moorings, just a yard — storage by application for catamarans, monohulls, Optimists and boards, with 2025-26 fees from $65 for a junior class boat to $275 for a cat — a car-park gate, and an upstairs meeting room.

The beach faces north-west, which defines the sailing. Prevailing westerlies arrive side-on to slightly onshore, piling deep water against the beach face and pushing up an outer bar 100 to 200 metres wide when the wind really comes in — bouncy reaching conditions for a lightweight RS Aero, and a workout getting through it in a Flying Ant. Summer sea breezes from the south and west give the most reliable afternoons, and the northern outlook means the club catches weather systems as they sweep across the bay's head. A live webcam plus a Davis Vantage Pro2 Plus weather station feed members wind, rain and barometric-pressure readings so they can check the beach before driving down.

The surrounding water is classic eastern Port Phillip: clear, relatively protected compared with Bass Strait on the ocean side of the Peninsula, and roomy enough for full championship courses, as the RS Aero nationals proved. Safety Beach and Martha Cove sit close by, giving cruising days natural destinations up and down the coast. When championship fleets of fifty dinghies or more descend, the broad beach and open bay absorb them without strain, as the national title regatta proved.

Directory records put the club's founding in 1960, though that date deserves a caveat: it rests on a single listing source and is not confirmed on the club's own site, so treat it as indicative rather than verified. The founders' names and the early clubhouse story have not been documented in publicly available material, and the club's own published pages concentrate on what it does now rather than how it began.

What can be stated confidently is the modern record, and it is impressively busy for a volunteer beach club. The women's sailing initiative of 2017 marked a turning point, formalised through the SheSails network and since held up as a model for other clubs. Event hosting followed. The RS Aero class brought its Victorian state championships here in March 2020, returned for an RS Aero Day in December 2021, and in January 2024 the club ran the class's Australian national championship over five days with more than 50 boats expected — a substantial logistical exercise for a club whose entire infrastructure is a clubhouse, a yard and a beach.

The 2026 International Flying Dutchman Victorian titles continue the pattern.

The club has also threaded itself into the Peninsula's wider sailing fabric. Blairgowrie Yacht Squadron's Petersville Regatta, one of the bay's enduring keelboat events, finishes its second-day cruising race at Mount Martha after 23 miles down the coast, making the beach a finish-line destination for fleets from across the southern bay. From whatever its exact beginnings were, the club has grown into the kind of place where a seven-year-old in an OziOpti and a national champion in an Aero might rig within metres of each other on the same stretch of grass.