Queenscliff Cruising Yacht Club

The sign outside the clubhouse reads simply Paradise, and nobody who has spent a weekend there argues with it. Queenscliff Cruising Yacht Club occupies Sand Island, next door to Swan Island right at the entrance to Port Phillip, and it is unlike any other club on the bay: a keelboat-only, cruising-centred club run entirely on a self-help, co-operative basis by its members, where the bar opening is announced by a yellow flag and a horn, and kangaroos and possums wander the island past the moored yachts.

Getting there is part of the ritual. The club's land is leased from the state and administered by Parks Victoria, and vehicle access runs through a Department of Defence security gate at the end of Bridge Street, Queenscliff — Checkpoint 1, open roughly seven to seven. You cannot walk or cycle across the causeway, pets and camping are banned, and crews sleep aboard their boats — as yachties should.

Inside the clubhouse the rules keep the mood analog: no television, no Wi-Fi and no power cabled down to the boats, with engines and generators permitted for battery charging only between nine and noon. The Ocean Racing Club of Victoria has described the place as an extremely well equipped, member-operated lodge for yachties, which captures it exactly.

The club's character has been shaped by deliberate modernisation as much as tradition. In October 2021 Lee Renfree was elected the club's first female Commodore, and her work — recognised with the 2022 Australian Sailing Victorian She Sails Award — has pushed female helm divisions into every one of the club's signature races. For cruising sailors who want a base at the Heads, a destination for bay passages, and a club where membership means lending a hand, Paradise lives up to its sign.

KISS — the Keelboat Introduction to Sailing Savvy program — is the club's creation and its clearest contribution to Victorian sailing. Established in 2021-22 under Commodore Lee Renfree, it is a by-women, for-women keelboat training course built from six online webinars, a Category 5 boat safety audit and a full day of hands-on workshops covering safety, radio and diesel engines, culminating in a thirty-nautical-mile passage race and rally from Altona to Queenscliff.

The first running, in July 2022, drew twenty-five women from eleven clubs with a waitlist behind them, supported by a grant from the state government's Office of Women in Sport and Recreation and by the ORCV. By 2025 more than eighty sailors had come through the program, and Renfree collected further national recognition during National Volunteers Week.

That program sits atop a calendar built for keelboats and their crews. The season opens on Melbourne Cup weekend with the HMAS Goorangai Memorial Trophy, a roughly twenty-six-nautical-mile passage race from Royal Brighton Yacht Club down the bay to the island — its fiftieth running came in 2025. Easter brings the Queenscliff Cup regatta, and Opening Day includes a traditional blessing of the fleet.

Women's participation is structural rather than decorative: all the club's on-water events now carry female helm divisions, with the Eliza Ramsden Trophy added to the Goorangai race in 2024 and a Commodore's Trophy for female helms joining the Queenscliff Cup in 2022, first won by Janet Torode of Royal Geelong.

There is no junior or dinghy pathway — this is a keelboat club and makes no apology for it. Instead the club serves as a destination partner: the ORCV's Women's Helm, Navigator and Radio Operator Race finishes here each August, with the Women's Return Sprint starting off the club wharf and boats rafting up for the night. For sailors whose ambition runs to passage-making rather than dinghy circuits, the club is both a venue and an education.

Sand Island is, in part, a human-made place: spoil dredged from Queenscliff Harbour helped build it, pushing the bay shoreline some four hundred metres seaward. Today the club sits between two waters — the protected shallows of Swan Basin to the west, adjoining the Swan Bay Marine Park, and an open sandy Port Phillip beach to the east. Queenscliff and its ferry lie just across the Cut, and Port Phillip Heads, with the notorious Rip, are minutes away under sail. That position makes the club the natural jumping-off point for yachts bound through the Heads into Bass Strait, and a safe haven for those coming in.

The wharf precinct is the operational heart. Two wharves, north and south, flank a dinghy ramp, and together they accommodate around thirty-five boats rafted up to three deep in roughly 2.3 metres of water at low tide. Boats over eighteen metres overall cannot be berthed, and anything over fifteen needs committee permission. The local tide lore matters: high and low water at the wharf run about three hours behind the Heads, and the current through the Queenscliff Cut can touch five knots, with the Sorrento ferry berthing at its head — first-time visitors quickly learn to time their arrivals.

Wharfage is modest: registered members' boats pay twenty-five dollars a night up to sixty nights a year, visitors fifty-five.

The clubhouse itself is the other half of the attraction: a commercial-style kitchen, dining and meeting rooms, an upstairs members' bar and reading room, viewing decks, bathrooms, laundry, barbecues, a pizza oven, a workshop, dinghy storage and a launching ramp — all maintained by member labour at an October working bee that traditionally flows into the AGM. A new North Wharf was officially opened during the 2025 season celebrations, the latest improvement in six decades of self-built infrastructure.

The club was born from a practical idea: keelboat sailors from around Port Phillip needed a base at the Heads. Occupancy of a modest spit at the bay's entrance was secured in October 1962 by Arthur Webb, Ross Farrow and Ranald McAllister, the club's founding trustees, after negotiations involving the Borough of Queenscliffe plus the public works and Defence departments. On 21 January 1963, forty yachtsmen met at Royal Brighton Yacht Club and formally brought the Queenscliff Cruising Yacht Club into being. Members then built the clubhouse with their own hands, opening it in December 1964 — establishing the co-operative, self-help ethic that still defines the place.

Memory and commemoration run deep in the club's calendar. The HMAS Goorangai Memorial Trophy honours the minesweeper that went down following a collision with MV Duntroon on 20 November 1940, all twenty-four of her crew lost — the Royal Australian Navy's first casualty of the Second World War. The trophy was presented by former club member Les Nangle, who had served aboard Goorangai as a petty officer in the Naval Reserve, and the race reached its fiftieth running in 2025.

In 2024 the club added the Eliza Ramsden Trophy, commemorating the three-masted barque that came to grief on Corsair Rock at the Heads in 1875 — her recovered anchor stands today outside the Queenscliff Maritime Museum — creating a women's division for the Goorangai race.

Milestones have kept coming. The sixtieth anniversary was celebrated over the last weekend of October 2022 with the Goorangai race and an Opening Day blessing of the fleet. A year earlier, Lee Renfree's election as first female Commodore had set the club's modern course and earned her state-level recognition for that work. The sixty-third season opened on 1 November 2025 with the fiftieth Goorangai and the official opening of the new North Wharf. Six decades on, the club still works the way its founders built it: members doing the work, on an island they were trusted to keep.