Palm Beach Sailing Club

Palm Beach Sailing Club is a community sailing club on Pittwater at Palm Beach, NSW. The club runs organised racing (primarily for off-the-beach catamarans such as Hobies and A-class, and windsurfers), social events and membership programs. The club also offers introductory "Learn to Sail" courses using a Hobie 18 catamaran; courses are run most Sundays during the season, start at the clubhouse (1 Iluka Rd, Palm Beach) and include on‑water instruction. Contacts shown on the website include comm.pbsc@gmail.com and phone numbers for the club and an instructor.

The standout offering is hands-on catamaran tuition for adults: learn-to-sail sessions run most Sundays in season as four-hour classes from ten until two, taught on a Hobie 18 with a preferred class size of just two students — four is possible — and priced at fifty dollars a day. The syllabus is thoroughly practical: launching off the beach and retrieving the boat, steering and sail trim, tacks, gybes, person-overboard recovery, reading wind and water, and, for those ready, an introduction to the trapeze.

Instruction comes from Scott Kesteven, a Dinghy Instructor qualified through Australian Sailing, who brings more than fifty years of sailing experience to the beach. Children from eight years and young teenagers can join in, provided a parent or guardian enrols alongside them — a family-first arrangement that suits the club's character.

Beyond the formal course, learning here is deeply social. Saturday-morning sailing schools have run periodically, teaching everything from basic knot-tying through to advanced racing technique, and experienced members informally mentor newcomers on rigging, tuning, crew work and tactics. A common entry route is simply to crew for a seasoned skipper and absorb the craft race by race.

Each season opens with an Open Day known as the Heart Starter, when visitors can hop aboard a catamaran and feel what multihull speed is like; the 2018 edition even drew the Deputy Mayor. The club is not an accredited Discover Sailing Centre and does not run the Tackers junior program — instruction remains deliberately member-led and informal. For sailors who progress into racing, the Saturday-afternoon club championship and pointscore series provide the competitive ladder, and the depth of talent on the beach means coaching by osmosis happens whether you seek it or not.

The clubhouse sits at 1 Iluka Road, Palm Beach, on Sand Point — the locals also know it as Sandy Beach — on the western foreshore of Pittwater, just around the corner from Barrenjoey Headland and diagonally opposite the end of Snapperman Lane. Boats rig on the beach and the grassy verge reached via Sand Point Lane, with trailer parking beside Iluka Park; the club holds a limited allocation of season passes, with some free parking behind the western car park. It is an unassuming setup, but the sailing arena it opens onto is anything but.

Pittwater is a broad, protected estuary ringed by national park, and the summer nor-east sea breeze funnels in reliably across the racing area, which for the big regatta sprawls from Governor Phillip Park across to West Head, The Basin and Careel Bay. What makes this stretch of water famous, though, is its treachery. Where the sea breeze bends around Barrenjoey Headland and its sand spit, it spawns "bullets" — fluky, violent gusts that bounce down the headland and arrive without warning, more than capable of pitching an unwary catamaran straight over.

Generations of sailors have learned respect here the wet way, and the hazard is celebrated rather than cursed: the club's signature regatta takes its name from those very gusts. The season runs from a late-August Heart Starter through to May, pausing over Christmas, with racing on Saturday afternoons. Between races the backdrop does its own quiet work — dolphins, turtles and sea eagles are commonly spotted from the trampolines.

It is, by any measure, one of Sydney's great natural sailing amphitheatres, and the club's belief that competence earned here travels anywhere is easy to understand after one gusty afternoon.

The club traces its beginnings to 1949, when it was founded as the Palm Beach Catamaran Club, sailing chiefly off the southern end of Sandy Beach. An earlier profile put the start a year later, in 1950, with a fleet of small monohulls and "the odd catamaran" — the club's own telling prefers 1949, and either way the multihull thread was present from the outset. The second great strand of the story began in 1962, when the Pittwater Catamaran Club was established, sailing strictly for catamarans of all types off Sandy Beach near Sand Point Lane.

That club became a genuine production line of State, National, World and Olympic champions, and it marked a half-century of multihull sailing off the beach in 2012. Around 1999–2000 the two clubs merged, and today's Palm Beach Sailing Club carries both lineages.

The competitive record is remarkable for a beach club. David Forbes won Star class gold at the 1972 Munich Olympics and a Star world title in 1971; Chris Cairns took Tornado bronze in Los Angeles in 1984; Mitch Booth and John Forbes collected bronze in Barcelona in 1992, Booth adding silver in 1996 and Forbes silver at Sydney 2000; Jason Waterhouse and Lisa Darmanin won silver in Rio in 2016. Member Upu Kila received an MBE recognising his sailing achievements in Papua New Guinea.

The annual Beware the Bullets Regatta, held on November's third weekend, has run consecutively for over half a century — 2018 was its 53rd edition — and in the 1970s and 1980s it drew more than two hundred catamarans to Governor Phillip Park. The 2018 running incorporated the NSW Taipan State Titles, and the 2025 edition saw John Forbes sailing with daughter Bronte alongside Nacra 15 sailors bound for the Youth Worlds. The name, fittingly, honours Barrenjoey's notorious gusts.