Sun City Yacht Club

Introduction

• Sun City Yacht Club (SCYC) is the volunteer-run yacht club located at Two Rocks marina, approximately an hour north of central Perth. Established on 11 November 1974, the club promotes dinghy and keelboat sailing along with powerboating and community-focused activities.

What the club offers

• Accredited Australian Sailing Discover Sailing Centre offering learn-to-sail experiences for juniors and adults.
• Regular Saturday dinghy sailing during the summer season and opportunities to crew on keelboats based at the marina.
• A family‑oriented, volunteer-run club with an active social calendar including quiz nights, themed events and an annual Christmas party.

Membership and community

• The club describes itself as highly family‑oriented and welcoming; most roles and race support are volunteer-run. New members and visitors are invited to contact the club directly to enquire about membership, events and crewing opportunities.

The fastest way onto the water at Two Rocks runs straight through the club's own front door: Sun City is an accredited Australian Sailing Discover Sailing Centre, and teaching sits at the heart of its identity rather than on the margins. The club maintains a fleet of twenty dinghies spread across four different classes — the specific class names are not published on its website — and directs its energy, by its own account, at introducing and training juniors and adults in sailing basics.

Graduates need not look far for the next rung: regular Saturday dinghy sailing runs through the summer, and members are also offered opportunities to sail on keelboats out of the marina. The fixture that best captures the club's personality is the annual Ron Tough Spot Race, a certified piece of Two Rocks tradition: dinghies of every class race from the marina two nautical miles out to the local landmark known as The Spot and back, with briefing between nine and half past in the morning, a ten o'clock start, and lunch at the club to follow.

There is also an annual family-friendly triathlon — teams of three combining swimming, running and sailing — which could hardly be more Two Rocks in spirit. Off the water the calendar stays just as busy, with bookings handled through TryBooking: quiz nights, Oktoberfest, Mexican fiestas, cocktail evenings, firepit pizza nights and an annual Christmas party. Alongside dinghy and keelboat sailing, the club promotes powerboating as well, making it a three-way doorway into boating life for Perth's far northern coastal suburbs.

Sun City sails where Perth's river clubs cannot: the open Indian Ocean. Racing heads straight out of the Two Rocks marina into genuine blue water, including the two-nautical-mile leg to The Spot that anchors the club's signature dinghy race. It is exposed, salt-stung coastal sailing — the kind of water that forged the America's Cup campaigns trained here in the late 1970s — and in summer the rhythm follows the Western Australian coastal pattern, with the afternoon sea breeze giving Saturday racing its engine, though conditions offshore here demand more respect than any sheltered river course.

The marina itself carries a slice of Australian yachting history. For years after 1974 it served as a favoured destination for international visiting yachts — in particular the ocean-going rigs that could not pass beneath the fixed bridges spanning the Swan River in Perth — and it was the first marina along this coast to install a Travel (Tami) Lift capable of handling large boats. Club addresses cluster around the marina precinct: event listings give Australis Drive, while a directory profile places the clubhouse at Pope Street, Two Rocks.

The surrounding Two Rocks-Yanchep coast, about an hour north of the city, remains lightly developed by metropolitan standards, which is precisely why the local community — as the 2024 news coverage reported — has been pressing for heritage recognition of the area. For a dinghy sailor or keelboat crew chasing open-water racing without a long road trip from Perth's northern suburbs, Sun City's stretch of ocean is the nearest thing to a front-row seat.

The founding group that gathered on 11 November 1974 was, in the club's own description, a band of dedicated sailors and businessmen — and one name among them would soon dominate Australian sport. Alan Bond's early affection for Two Rocks ran deep enough that he first planned to base his America's Cup ambitions there, and through the challenges of 1977 and 1980 the yachts Southern Cross, Gretel and Australia I worked up off Two Rocks and Yanchep before defeat sent the campaign elsewhere; the eventual 1983 triumph with Australia II was sailed under the burgee of Royal Perth Yacht Club.

The marina those Cup boats made famous had its own golden era: for many years it drew international cruising yachts unable to clear the Swan River bridges, and its pioneering large-boat lift kept it on the visiting-yacht map. Through its early keelboat era the club thrived on the back of that scene, running frequent keelboat races and small catamaran events out of the marina.

Like many coastal clubs, Sun City subsequently had to reinvent itself — and the modern reinvention leans on teaching, community and the social calendar rather than ocean-racing glamour. The fiftieth-birthday White Party of 23 November 2024 celebrated exactly that club: half a century continuous, still introducing people to sailing, as the February 2024 feature coverage emphasised.

That story reached a national audience when Australian Rural & Regional News syndicated the Yanchep News Online report produced through a multimedia journalism project with Google Australia — fitting recognition for a small club whose patch of ocean once hosted the most famous yachts in the country.