Speers Point Amateur Sailing Club

Speers Point Amateur Sailing Club (SPASC) is a community, family-oriented sailing club based at the northern end of Lake Macquarie next to Speers Point Park. The club runs organised sail racing (Saturday seasonal racing, September–April), hosts regattas, and supports both monohull and catamaran fleets. SPASC operates junior and adult learn-to-sail programs through accredited dinghy instructors (an Australian Sailing Discover Sailing Centre) and offers club boats for trial use. Facilities described include a clubhouse with viewing deck, large grassed rigging area, ample parking and multiple ramps for launching and retrieving dinghies, catamarans and larger trailer boats.

The junior pathway at Speers Point is built on a philosophy many bigger clubs would do well to copy: no junior is hurried toward racing until their skills and maturity are ready for it. Programs lean on fun, games and adventure to bed down foundation skills first, with juniors typically taking about two seasons to reach independence. The pathway itself has four clearly marked stages. Start Sailing 1 and 2 take ages eight to sixteen on Sunday mornings in club boats with lifejackets provided, priced at $470, or $300 for families with their own Optimist.

From there sailors move through Green Fleet, then the Silver Fleet and Adventure Series, and finally the Transition to Racing Gold Fleet in ILCA 4s and 6s or O'pen Skiffs — Optimists are deliberately left behind at that point, steering teenagers toward the boats they will race as seniors.

Adults get a serious pathway too: a ten-week adult Start Sailing course, open also to teenagers, generally those over fourteen, taught to the Australian Sailing syllabus in club-provided ILCA 4s. Juniors are encouraged to climb the instructor ladder as Assistant Instructors and then Dinghy Instructors, and the club's bench strength shows — four accredited Dinghy Instructors and five assistants were supporting the programs as of 2025. A Friday twilight junior race series and weekend Gold Fleet racing bridge the gap into senior club competition, and the annual Lake Mac O'pen Skiff and ILCA Champs, drawing fifty-plus young sailors, gives the pathway a home regatta to aim at.

The club's training fleet of Optimists, O'pen Skiffs and ILCAs feeds a senior racing scene of genuine breadth: Tasars, ILCAs, A-Class and Arrow catamarans, Nacra 5.8s and 20s, F18s, Hobie 14s, 16s and 18s, Hartley TS16s, Corsairs and the occasional trailer-sailer. Junior membership is $110, family membership $385, and NSW Active Kids vouchers are accepted — pricing plainly set to keep the door open.

The clubhouse stands at 20B Park Road, inside the park at the top end of Lake Macquarie. From the upper deck the view sweeps across the lake, and the surrounding parkland gives the club something money cannot buy: a large grassed rigging area where whole regatta fleets can spread out, with camping available on site during major events. Two wide ramps handle dinghies and catamarans on beach trolleys, and a separate boat ramp takes larger trailer boats. Ample parking, a bar, a kiosk and food on race days round out a facility mix that explains why class associations keep bringing their state and national titles here.

The sailing water is Lake Macquarie at its most open. The lake is widely known as Australia's largest coastal saltwater lake, and from Speers Point the courses can run long in any direction without touching a channel marker or a tidal rip. Off-the-beach classes thrive on exactly this: steady summer breezes, room for multi-lap courses, and a lee shore close enough to keep safety cover simple. The club's catamaran strength — nearly half the racing fleet — says plenty about the quality of the reaching water off the park.

The season runs from early September to Anzac Day, with Friday twilight and Saturday afternoon racing as the weekly spine. The annual fixtures give the calendar its personality: the 14-foot Cat and Monohull Regatta, the event known as Catagatta, the Marathon race around Pulbah Island, and the Anzac Day Regatta to close the summer. Pulbah Island, the big bush-clad island in the lake's southern basin, gives the marathon its navigation interest and turns a club race into a proper lake crossing. Between the park, the ramps, the island course and a season that stretches across eight months, Speers Point offers about as complete an off-the-beach sailing setup as a volunteer club can assemble.

The club traces its history to at least 1905, founded on the point locals came to call Shipbuilders — a name that hints at the working waterfront the area once was. That makes Speers Point among the longest-established sailing clubs on the lake, and life member Jane Klein has captured the full sweep of it in her history, Sailing Speers Point, 1880 Onwards, which the club recommends to anyone wanting the deep account.

By the 1920s the club hosted a big fleet of 16-foot skiffs, the working-class racing machines of the era. By the 1950s it had become a stronghold of the Vaucluse Junior, the little Sydney skiff that spread through the eastern states, and in the decades that followed mixed fleets raced off the point — VJs, Skates, NS14s, Moths and Sabots sharing the same courses. Catamarans joined in 1969, Tasars arrived in 1983, and both remain central to the club's identity today.

The clubhouse has its own tale. Construction of the current building began in the early 1950s when members shifted the original structure plank by plank to its present spot on the edge of Speers Point Park, chasing better access to the water. Extensions followed as fundraising allowed, and the finished clubhouse was officially opened in 1974.

Recent history has been about recognition catching up with reality. Discover Sailing Centre accreditation came in 2022, formalising a training operation that had been building for years. Then, in February 2023, Speers Point was named one of just three clubs in Australia to host a visit from the Australian SailGP team — Jason Waterhouse and Nina Curtis among the sailors who came to the park.

For a club of fewer than 120 members, run by a nine-person volunteer executive with strong ties to the local council and business community, it was a marker of how far the plank-by-plank clubhouse has travelled since 1905. Social glue helps too: the calendar includes a Pirates Picnic, and a solid contingent of non-sailing members keeps the race tower staffed.