Wynnum Manly Yacht Club

Wynnum Manly Yacht Club (WMYC) is at 542 Royal Esplanade, Manly, on Brisbane's bayside. Established in 1962, it is a sailing and boating club with cruising, racing and dragon boat activities, and a clubhouse with dining, a bar and regular social events.

The club's marina, operated by Wynnum Manly Yacht Club Marina Ltd, sits deepest inside Manly Boat Harbour and is promoted as the most protected marina in the harbour, with around 280 wet berths from 8 to 19 metres, about 40 dry berths for trailer boats up to 9 metres, and full slipway services. Racing includes twilight races and the annual St Helena Cup. The sailing club that races from the same address, Wynnum Manly Sailing Club, is affiliated with Australian Sailing. See our Manly sailing clubs page for other clubs in the harbour.

The club runs organised racing series (including an annual St Helena Cup, twilight races and other regattas) and hosts community sailing activities and event days. The clubhouse lists sailing resources, Meet the Fleet information for race entrants and social sailing events. For learn-to-sail courses and junior programs, contact the club or its sailing arm, Wynnum Manly Sailing Club.

Being the innermost marina in Manly Boat Harbour is the whole point here. Outside the breakwaters, Waterloo Bay can kick up a short chop in a fresh northerly, and the dredged entrance channel across the shallows demands the leads be followed, but once a boat is through the harbour entrance and into the WMYC arm the water is flat in nearly anything, which is exactly why members bought berths here and why the slipway has steady work.

The club is a short walk from Manly Harbour Village, so provisioning, the bakery, the post office and the Muirs chandlery are all on foot, and the train from Manly station puts Brisbane's CBD 45 minutes away for crew changes. Out on the bay, the club's racing fleet knows every mark: the St Helena and Green Island courses, the run to Peel Island's Horseshoe Bay for weekend raft-ups, and south through the islands toward Canaipa and the Broadwater for the adventurous, though that passage shoals to less than a metre at low water and is a springs-only exercise.

The club's social calendar, twilight races and dragon boat training keep the foreshore animated, and the clubhouse deck is where visiting crews end up after being waved in on a casual membership. Tides run to about two metres and the harbour fairway is dredged, but arrivals drawing much over two metres should time the top of the tide. Winter westerlies make for crisp, flat-water sailing on the bay, summer brings the reliable north-east sea breeze by early afternoon, and the pelican population around the cleaning tables is, members insist, the best-fed in Queensland.

At the head of Manly Boat Harbour, tucked deepest inside the breakwaters, sits the marina that locals call the Manly Marina, operated by Wynnum Manly Yacht Club Marina Ltd and promoted, with some justification, as the most protected marina in the harbour. Its structure is unusual and worth understanding. The 280 wet berths are not owned by the marina company; they are owned by individual club members, and buying a berth automatically makes the owner a shareholder in Wynnum Manly Yacht Club Marina Ltd, which manages rentals and operations on the members' behalf.

Better still for owners, the foreshore leases have been extended to 2053 and berth owners pay no government lease extension fees, retaining ownership through the extensions, which explains the steady trickle of berth sales advertised through coastal brokers. The fleet skews to practical Queensland boating: wet berths from 8 to 19 metres including catamaran pens, around 40 dry berths for trailer boats to 9 metres, and 40 dinghy racks with their own ramp and retrieval system for the sailing fleet.

The parent Wynnum Manly Yacht Club, which styles itself the friendliest yacht club in the bay, runs the licensed clubhouse, a waterfront dining room, an active regatta and social calendar, and even hosts the Manly Dragon Boat Club, founded in 2006, whose paddlers train from the same shore. Depths are honest rather than generous, two to three metres at low water, and the club makes no apology for it: this is a sailors' marina in the old style, sheltered, member-owned and walking distance from the Manly shops.