Sailing club
RANSA (Royal Australian Naval Sailing Association)
RANSA (Royal Australian Naval Sailing Association) is a sailing club based at Rushcutters Bay that promotes sailing for naval and local members. The club runs regular harbour racing (Wednesdays and Saturdays in winter, Friday twilight series in summer) and an annual regatta, maintains a clubhouse and member facilities, offers membership services, and advertises venue hire and an on-site Navy Bear Cafe. Contact details and office hours are listed for membership, racing and mooring enquiries.
About
RANSA (Royal Australian Naval Sailing Association) at a glance
RANSA (Royal Australian Naval Sailing Association) is a sailing club based at Rushcutters Bay that promotes sailing for naval and local members. The club runs regular harbour racing (Wednesdays and Saturdays in winter, Friday twilight series in summer) and an annual regatta, maintains a clubhouse and member facilities, offers membership services, and advertises venue hire and an on-site Navy Bear Cafe. Contact details and office hours are listed for membership, racing and mooring enquiries.
Service area: Rushcutters Bay, Sydney Harbour, NSW
- Region
- Sydney Harbour
- Club type
- Maritime sailing club
- Australian Sailing
- Not listed as affiliated
- Primary classes
- Maritime sailing club
About RANSA (Royal Australian Naval Sailing Association)
Smaller member sailing club at Rushcutters Bay with marina berths, a relaxed atmosphere and mid-range pricing for the area.
Sailing waters
Rushcutters Bay is the densest concentration of recreational sailing infrastructure in Australia: RANSA's Tin Shed, the CYCA next door, the d'Albora marina on the northern side, and hundreds of swing moorings filling the bay between them. The water is protected and the sailing starts within minutes of leaving the berth, but the bay itself is too crowded with moorings for comfortable anchoring, and is best treated as a departure point. Boxing Day brings the harbour's biggest crowd as the Sydney Hobart fleet musters off the CYCA, and RANSA members watch the start from a few hundred metres away. Ashore, Rushcutters Bay Park wraps the foreshore, Edgecliff station is a ten-minute walk, and the restaurants of Potts Point, Darlinghurst and Double Bay are close enough for crew dinners. The club's naval heritage gives it quirks visitors notice: trophies and memorabilia from decades of fleet sailing, a start boat named RANSA One recently replaced by member fundraising, and the Samuel Pepys Trophy the club proposed for small yachts in the Hobart race back in 1958. Parking near the club is tight on race days. For visiting sailors with reciprocal rights, the routine is simple: sign in, find a berth or mooring through the office, and turn up on a Friday in summer with a crew and an appetite for the post-race sausage and prizegiving in the Whaler Bar. The parkland behind the club was once a shallow tidal bay where Sydney's first settlers cut rushes for thatch, which is how the suburb got its name.
Club history
The Royal Australian Naval Sailing Association occupies the 'Tin Shed', a heritage-listed weatherboard clubhouse on the water at Rushcutters Bay that stands on the site of Australia's oldest extant naval base. RANSA has always been the navy's own sailing club, founded to give serving and former naval personnel affordable access to the harbour, and it retains that democratic character: membership categories run from serving ADF members at 205 dollars a year through to sailing, crew and country members, every one including Australian Sailing affiliation. The atmosphere is deliberately casual, a volunteer-run club where the Whaler Bar fills with crews after twilight racing and the Navy Bear Cafe, part of the local Bird and Bear group, serves breakfast and lunch over the water. Sailing activity is the club's centre of gravity: Friday twilight social racing through summer, winter racing on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, the RANSA Regatta each February, Pirates Day in March, a cruising division that ranges the harbour and Pittwater, and even a radio-controlled yacht group racing in the adjacent pond on Wednesdays. The club hosts one round of the Sydney Harbour Women's Keelboat Series. Compared with its grand neighbour, the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia, RANSA is smaller, cheaper and more relaxed, and its berths, moorings and DIY slipway are priced to keep ordinary sailors on the water rather than to maximise revenue. The clubhouse itself, plain and practical, is part of the attraction: a genuine piece of working harbour heritage rather than an architect's statement, with the water lapping under the floor and the city skyline filling the windows.