Princess Royal Sailing Club

Introduction

• Princess Royal Sailing Club (PRSC) sits at Pagoda Point, Little Grove, overlooking Princess Royal Harbour roughly nine kilometres from Albany town centre. The clubhouse and marina front a natural harbour that provides both sheltered waters for training and robust access to King George Sound for larger ocean events.

What the club offers

• A full October–June sailing season with Saturday racing as the core activity and additional twilight and special events.
• An on‑site marina with multiple pen sizes, visiting-boat berthing, hard‑stand storage and dinghy storage facilities.
• Accredited training for adults and instructors through the club’s Discover Sailing Centre activities, plus a regular Sailability program.
• Active social calendar and function spaces including a bar, restaurant and event facilities.

Community role

• PRSC positions itself as both a competitive sailing centre and a social community hub for sailors, families and visitors: from Learn to Sail keelboat courses for adults through to regional junior regattas and accessibility sailing sessions.

Adults learning on keelboats is the signature here. Princess Royal runs a six-week Learn to Sail course for sailors aged twenty-one and over, priced at $360 and leading to Australian Sailing's Start Crewing and Start Helming certificates — a structured on-ramp for grown-ups delivered through the club's accredited Discover Sailing Centre. Youth development scales up to a regional event: the annual Great Southern Youth Clinic and Regatta welcomes junior and youth sailors under twenty, with invited classes spanning the Minnow, Optimist and Open Skiff, the ILCA 4, 6 and 7 rigs, Pelican and Mirror dinghies, the 420 and 29er, the 125, and the RS Feva, RS Quest and Pacer — a roll-call that turns the harbour into the south coast's youth sailing capital for the duration.

A weekly Sailability program on Thursday mornings offers supported time on the water for people of all abilities, backed by specialised equipment and trained volunteers. The club also grows the instructors themselves, hosting Australian Sailing courses including a Keelboat Trainer program — normally $435 but offered free with grant funding — plus Assistant Dinghy Instructor and Safety Boat Operator qualifications, an investment that lifts capability across the whole Great Southern.

Dinghy sailors get early-morning Saturday learn-to-sail sessions, while a Cruising division casts off every Wednesday morning for leisurely harbour passages. Training is underwritten by named local support: Backing comes from Pinelock Systems, Rusty's Marine, the Albany Port Authority, Healthway and the state Department of Local Government, Sport and Cultural Industries. Racing anchors the week through the long October-to-June season, with Saturdays devoted to a full calendar plus twilight events, and coaching woven through.

It is an unusually complete offering for a regional club — entry-level to instructor level, dinghy to keelboat, racing to cruising — and the breadth is entirely documented.

Nine kilometres from the centre of Albany, the club looks out over Princess Royal Harbour from Little Grove, a position that hands its sailors two distinct bodies of water. Inside the heads, the harbour itself offers sheltered, reliable sailing — the natural arena for junior training, Sailability mornings and the Saturday club racing that fills the long season.

Beyond lies King George Sound, the grand open anchorage where ocean racing begins and where the club draws conditions for its bigger events; the club notes that it takes advantage of both environments, and the geography is genuinely unusual among Australian regional clubs. Shore infrastructure matches the water. A full marina serves the keelboat fleet — the largest pens measure twelve metres by five and a half, and three catamaran pens of ten metres by ten accommodate the multihulls — while a hard stand and boat shed handle storage and maintenance.

Visiting yachts drawing 2.4 metres or less are welcomed, making the club a recognised port of call for cruisers working along the south coast. Off-the-beach sailors launch by ramp, and the local Flying Fifteen contingent — three boats registered — sails Saturdays in season plus twilight fixtures. A bar, restaurant and function centre complete the waterfront picture, and the social calendar runs deep: quiz nights, themed dinners and live music sit alongside Friday member meals, Saturday sundowners from half past four and Sunday Sundowners.

The harbour even supplies the start line for another sport entirely — the Albany Harbour Swim, a four-kilometre open-water crossing, sets off from the club before finishing at Peace Park in town. Princess Royal Harbour has sheltered shipping for two centuries; for the sailors of Little Grove it remains the club's greatest asset.

The founding moment is precisely documented: 24 February 1909, when Frank Dymes brought Albany's sailing enthusiasts together at the Royal George Hotel in Stirling Terrace and a club was born. Early racing started from the Albany Town Jetty, and for its first decades the club lived a waterfront nomad's existence until the Shire of Albany granted it a lease of land at Pagoda Point, Little Grove, during the 1950s — the site it occupies to this day.

Stan Austin chronicled the first three-quarters of the journey in a 304-page volume published in 1986, its title marking seventy-five years of sailing at Albany from 1909 to 1984. The centenary year of 2009 produced the club's boldest celebration: revival of the ocean race from Fremantle to Albany — first sailed in 1968 and regarded, in the club's telling, as Western Australia's leading ocean race through the 1970s and 1980s before lapsing after the 1997 edition.

The revived race was set to return again on 19 April 2026 as part of Albany's Bicentenary celebrations, binding the club's story to the city's own two-hundred-year milestone. Season 2020-21 was formally the club's 112th, opened by Albany MLA Peter Watson, while Commodore Susette Evans welcomed members — a season that also had the club slated for a three-day State Mirror Championship in January 2021, reduced from national status by the pandemic, alongside its annual Easter Regatta.

The club's convening role has only grown: on 18 May 2025 it hosted the first WA Sailing Summit Roadshow staged by Australian Sailing's state office, drawing club leaders from across the region to Little Grove. From a hotel meeting room in 1909 to a marina-fronted clubhouse hosting state-level gatherings, the arc of 116 seasons has bent steadily upward.