Newport Cruising Yacht Club

Newport Cruising Yacht Club is a community sailing club based on the Redcliffe Peninsula (Scarborough/Newport area) north of Brisbane. The club runs regular sailing events (Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, including SAGS and WAGS pursuit races) on the northern end of Moreton Bay and Deception Bay, and meets at a clubhouse (current clubhouse access from Klingner Road, Kippa-Ring) after events for social activities and member support including crewing and cruising enquiries.

The engine of the club week is pursuit racing, and Newport runs two flavours of it: WAGS — Wednesday Afternoon Good Sailing — and SAGS, the Saturday equivalent. In a pursuit format the handicaps are applied at the start rather than the finish, so boats depart at staggered times and, when the handicapper gets it right, converge at the line together — which at Newport happens quite deliberately, so that presentations can follow in the clubhouse while the afternoon is still warm.

Around that core the club has assembled a set of traditions with memorable acronyms: the RUMS series, and Cruising At Sunset — CAS — a relaxed Friday-afternoon race every couple of months that flows straight into dinner. Cruising-in-company trips to regional destinations cater for members who prefer anchorages to buoys. The annual calendar is crowded: the NCYC Regatta, the Rolly Hill Short Handed Race, the Lucinda Bay Classic, the Lady Skippers' Yacht Race, a Single Handed Yacht Race, the NCYC Marathon, Australia Day Sailing and the Labour Day Sprints, with a spinnaker race series reintroduced in early 2024.

Handicapping runs through a performance system documented in the Members' Handbook, giving the mixed fleet fair racing across the season. What the club does not currently advertise is a formal learn-to-sail arm — no Discover Sailing accreditation or structured junior course appears in the material available — and the 2021 clubhouse project was explicitly framed by then-Commodore Bolek Sulikowski as a way to enable more formal training alongside social gatherings.

Newcomers, in other words, learn by sailing with the fleet, and the forgiving pursuit format is built to make that work.

The clubhouse stands at 166 Klingner Road, Kippa Ring, reached through the cheerfully named Dick Tosser Turner Gate at the eastern end of the Walkers Creek bridge; members gather there on Wednesdays and Saturdays from about four in the afternoon. The sailing itself starts from two nearby departure points — the Newport Waterways canal estate and Scarborough Harbour, which anchor the peninsula's northern end.

From there the fleet spreads across the club's home waters at the northern end of Moreton Bay, taking in Deception Bay, with races typically starting and finishing near the Newport Waterways Outer Leads. It is a distinctly local sailing ground: rather than ranging the length of the bay, the club has built its racing around water reachable in an afternoon, which suits the weekly WAGS and SAGS rhythm and the goal of having everyone back for presentations. The canal-estate setting shapes the club in other ways too.

The Newport Waterways give the fleet sheltered passage out to the bay, and Scarborough Harbour provides the working-harbour services a keelboat fleet needs, while the clubhouse itself sits only minutes from both departure points. For visiting sailors the practical picture is simple: berth or launch around the harbour or the canals, race the northern bay in company with a friendly mixed fleet, and finish at a licensed clubhouse where the results are read out the same afternoon.

The arrangement reflects the club's community character — nothing here depends on travel or elaborate logistics, and a sailor can leave work, race a full course and be home for dinner, which is precisely the point.

The club sails today as Newport Cruising Yacht Club, but it began life as the Moreton Bay Yacht Club, and exactly when that original club was founded is a detail the record has so far declined to surrender — the members' handbook documents the name change while leaving the founding date unstated. What can be traced clearly is the club's long hunt for a home.

For years it had no permanent base and rented space where it could; the 2018 edition of the Members' Handbook places the clubhouse at the Compass Marinas premises at Scarborough Harbour, with access off Reef Point Esplanade. The decisive move came in 2021, when the club erected its first permanent clubhouse, a $205,000 build beside the canals near Talobilla Park.

The funding package was a model of community-club resourcefulness: $127,000 from the Queensland Government's Get Going Places and Spaces program, $22,900 from the Moreton Bay Regional Council and a $50,000 interest-free council loan, with completion expected in July 2021. Bolek Sulikowski served as Commodore through the project, with Gerardine Young as treasurer, and Sulikowski framed the new building as the key to more formal training and social gatherings — the club's ambitions finally given walls and a roof.

Community partnerships have grown alongside the bricks and mortar: the club supports the Redcliffe Coast Guard onshore, receives on-water assistance from QF3, and counts local firms — the Sea Salt & Vine Café, Scarborough Pest Control and Dirty Boat Bottoms among them — as backers. For a club that spent decades renting, the Klingner Road clubhouse marks the point at which Newport Cruising Yacht Club became a permanent fixture of peninsula sailing.