Port Stephens Yacht Club

Every burgee tells a story, and the orange-and-black flag of Port Stephens Yacht Club tells a better one than most: the cannon on its fly honours the military garrison posted to Soldiers Point in 1820 to watch for escapees from Sydney, and the emblem has stayed with the club through every change of name and address since. This is a keelboat club through and through, running close to 119 races and events a year across four seasons, from Saturday pointscores to offshore sprints beyond the heads.

Yet ask members what keeps them here and the answer is rarely the racing. Incoming Commodore Margaux Everett, who took the helm for 2025–26 as the first woman to hold the office, puts it plainly: "People join to sail however stay because of the friendships."

That social glue is easy to spot. Post-race barbecues and long storytelling sessions are built into club life, and the membership spans generations — families who joined decades ago now watch grandchildren take their turn on the same water. The club's own description of itself as "more than a sailing club — it's a community" is repeated often enough to have become something of a creed.

Traditions anchor the calendar: the Opening Day Sail Past, where around fifteen yachts file by the Commodore in full maritime dress, has run since the 1970s, while the family-friendly Max and Edna Race carries the memory of two founding figures. With a new Passage Regatta over the October long weekend and digital channels drawing more than 565,000 organic monthly views, this is a club looking forward as confidently as it looks back.

Welcoming people onto the water who might never otherwise get there is where Port Stephens Yacht Club's program stands apart. Its Women on Water gatherings give female sailors a dedicated pathway into the fleet, and a collaboration with Invictus Australia has opened the club's boats to veterans — an initiative the flag officers have championed alongside the broader PSYC Training Academy, which Commodore Margaux Everett has named a key focus for building participation. Structured junior dinghy tuition, it should be noted, is handled elsewhere on the waterway, by the Bay Sailing Centre at Salamander Bay, leaving PSYC to concentrate on what it does best: getting people racing keelboats.

The on-water ladder is deep and steady. Saturday racing splits into spinnaker and non-spinnaker pointscores, so crews can step up at their own pace, while Wednesday afternoon non-spinnaker racing and the Friday D'Albora Twilight Series offer gentler entry points for new skippers and fresh crew alike. Beyond the bay, the Inshore/Offshore Series and the Zhik marathon and sprint races take sailors out through the heads, and the late-December Broughton Island Cruise introduces the cruising side of the sport.

Across the year the program tallies roughly thirty pointscore races, six Commodore's Trophy races, nine inshore/offshore events and around twenty-one twilight races, plus standalone fixtures such as the Jack Hollman Race. For a sailor arriving with no boat and no experience, the route from rail-meat to regular crew is well worn — and the club's older hands, some with twenty-five or more seasons on local waters, are generous with what they know.

Port Stephens gives this club a rare double act. Inside the heads lies a broad, sheltered bay where the inshore fleets race in most conditions; outside sits open ocean, close enough that offshore sprints and marathon races can be slotted into a club calendar without a delivery voyage. A visiting cruising club's passage notes describe Port Stephens as an all-weather port with, in their words, "no real bar as such", which helps explain why generations of sailors have treated it as both a destination and a home base. When the racing pauses in late December, the fleet points north to Broughton Island for the club's signature cruise.

The club's footprint is spread across the waterway it serves. Its origins lie at Soldiers Point, and NSW licensing records still list Port Stephens Yacht Club Ltd at Ridgeway Avenue, Soldiers Point, while club communications speak of Nelson Bay and the central harbour presence the club gained when it shifted its centre of gravity there in 2003. Practical support comes through partnerships with the three D'Albora Marinas around the port — the Nelson Bay marina hosts the Friday twilight fleet for woodfired pizzas after racing — and the club maintains long-term moorings in the stretch between the marina and the island, one suited to boats up to 38 feet and another to 48 feet, with a third mooring also available.

Members and visiting yachts can hire them by the night or the month on published rates. April belongs to Sail Port Stephens, the big regional regatta run separately by Newcastle Cruising Yacht Club and Destination Port Stephens; PSYC suspends its own racing while the bay fills with visiting boats.

The club's own telling begins in 1971, when the Port Stephens Yacht Squadron was formed at Soldiers Point and small, keen local fleets started racing in what the club recalls as a grassroots and spirited scene. A second strand of the story, preserved on the club's Berman Trophy page, records Max and Edna Berman hosting a meeting at their East Maitland home on 31 March 1972 that gathered eleven founding members to establish the Soldiers Point Yacht Club, with Max Berman — a local builder — elected first Commodore.

Rather than a contradiction, the two dates read as the Squadron's early seasons and the formal building of its home: Berman did the groundwork that secured the land lease, a NSW Government grant and the development approval for the clubhouse. Club records also show the company behind the club registered in September 1997, and the Soldiers Point connection has endured on official documents ever since.

In 2003 the Squadron became Port Stephens Yacht Club, a change the club credits with giving it a central harbour presence and reach into a wider sailing community. Memory is honoured in the silverware: Edna Berman, longtime editor of the club magazine Quadrant, left $1,500 on her death in 1996, the interest funding prizes for the family-oriented non-spinnaker race that became the Max and Edna Race. The modern era has added brighter chapters.

In February 2022 the club welcomed solo circumnavigator Jeanne Socrates into its Saturday race at the helm of Cherylle Stone's Subzero; in 2025 the double-handed Open 40 Roaring Forty flew the PSYC banner in the Rolex Sydney Hobart for charity; and that same year Margaux Everett, a sailor of more than twenty years across SASC, RPAYC and PSYC, was appointed the club's first female Commodore, with Richard Kerr as her Vice Commodore.