RAN Sailing Association

RAN Sailing Association (RANSA) is a sailing club based at Sir David Martin Reserve, Rushcutters Bay (Sydney). It exists to encourage sailing within the Navy and also welcomes local non-service sailors as members. The club runs active racing and cruising programs — harbour racing on Wednesdays and Saturdays in winter, a Friday Twilight series in summer, and an annual RANSA Regatta each February — and stages social events, weekend cruises and member activities. The club operates an office and clubhouse at Rushcutters Bay and hosts a cafe (Navy Bear Cafe) and member bars during race events. Contact and office hours are published on the club website.

Adventure training with a naval purpose is the association's signature: Navy One exists to deliver the RAN's Sail and Adventure training program, using competitive offshore sailing to build teamwork, resilience and maritime skills in serving personnel. Crewed solely by sailors in uniform, the yacht has become a floating classroom with some of the toughest assessments in Australian sport — five Sydney Hobart campaigns and counting. The deliberate push to lift female participation showed its results in the 2025 race, when Navy One's crew was half women and co-skippered by Lieutenant Grace Corboy-Stevens alongside CPO Nicholas Greenhill.

Shoreside, the club's development programs reach well beyond the Defence community. Veterans Sailing @ RANSA, championed by Vice Commodore Giddings after his return to the board in 2023, gives former service people a structured way back onto the water, while Women's Sailing at RANSA runs as a dedicated program in its own right. The club also hosts and supports Sailability NSW, extending sailing to people with disability.

For ordinary members, the pathway is the racing calendar itself: a Winter Point Score Series on Saturdays, a Midweek Series on Wednesday afternoons and a Friday Twilight Series through summer, with community listings describing affordable adult learn-to-sail sessions as the front door and social sailing catering to every level of experience. It is not a junior dinghy school — nobody comes here for Tackers — but for adults who want to move from novice to harbour racer to offshore crew, few Sydney clubs offer a clearer runway, or a more purposeful one.

Few clubhouse sites in Sydney carry as much history per square metre. RANSA occupies the Sir David Martin Reserve at Rushcutters Bay, on the harbour's southern shore between Darling Point and the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia's marina at the bay's head, with views across one of the world's great racing amphitheatres. The building itself is a piece of naval heritage — it was once the Clearance Diving Teams Depot, before the divers shifted to HMAS Penguin — and the club now runs it as a rustic waterfront venue with a cafe and hire spaces, the sort of unpretentious harbourside room where sailing talk drifts easily across the bar.

The racing is all Sydney Harbour, and the club is woven into the harbour's combined racing culture. RANSA yachts join the Combined Winter Series alongside the Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron, Sydney Amateur Sailing Club, Royal Prince Edward Yacht Club and Middle Harbour Yacht Club, sharing a start area with one of the strongest winter fleets in the country. Through the week the association's own Wednesday afternoon and summer twilight races keep the local program humming, and the walk from the clubhouse to a mooring or a crew berth is measured in metres.

Rushcutters Bay suits the club's character: central, sheltered, steeped in the sport, and close enough to the heads that an offshore campaign like Navy One's can be prepared from home water. For visiting sailors, the venue's naval bones — the memorials, the ensign history, the burgee overhead — make it one of the more distinctive clubhouses on the harbour.

The lineage begins in Britain, where the Royal Naval Sailing Association was founded in 1935 to put sailing within reach of sailors of all ranks and rates. After the Second World War the association looked south: in June 1947, amid post-war demobilisation, the RNSA named the RAN Naval Officers' Club as its Branch Secretariat on the Australia Station, and that October the Royal Naval Sailing Association's Australia Branch was formed.

A war memorial plaque at Rushcutters Bay records that "in 1947 the Australian Navy Sailing Association, later to become RANSA, was founded in the boat-shed" at HMAS Rushcutter. In 1966, after the RNSA approved a new constitution, the name Royal Australian Naval Sailing Association, Sydney Squadron was formally recognised by the Minister for Defence, the change announced in Navy News on 4 March that year.

The ground beneath the clubhouse has its own story. HMAS Rushcutter was commissioned on 1 August 1940 to serve as an anti-submarine training school and paid off on 29 July 1968, leaving RANEL, the RAN Research Laboratory, and RANSA as the site's sole occupants; in 1980 the land passed to the State as Crown land — today's Sir David Martin Reserve, under Woollahra Council management. The modern racing record centres on Navy One, a Beneteau First 40 and former Lunchtime Legend — third in her IRC division of the 2011 Hobart under Robbo Robertson.

In RAN hands she has contested six Sydney Hobarts, winning the Oggin Cup, first raced for in 1984, in 2019, 2021, 2023 and 2025, collecting the PHS Corinthian York Trophy in 2024 as well. The 2025 win was the sweetest: co-skippers Greenhill and Corboy-Stevens beat the Army's new sister ship Rising Sun by six minutes after five days, with round-the-world solo sailor Jessica Watson in a crew that was half female.