Yarra Bay 16ft Skiff Sailing Club

Yarra Bay 16ft Skiff Sailing Club is a beachfront sailing club at Yarra Bay (Phillip Bay, NSW) offering member and guest facilities since 1928. The club hosts organised sailing activities for its class, provides a licensed restaurant (C Salt on the Beach), a Beach Bar & Kiosk, a 180-seat auditorium available for functions, and social/recreational events (pool tables, trivia, fishing weigh-ins). The club also publishes opening hours and contact details and operates a courtesy bus service for local pick-ups on weekends.

Yarra Bay's sailing operation runs on a two-division structure that has served it for generations. The Junior Division owns Sunday mornings, combining training with mixed-class junior racing in Sabots, Sky-Riders and Bics — a pathway that takes kids from their first tack to competitive fleet racing on flat, protected water. The Senior Division takes over on Sunday afternoons, where the fleets are multihulls, Lasers and Cherubs: quick, physical boats that suit the open water of the bay. It's a tidy arrangement — the youngest sailors get the morning's gentler breeze and clear water, the adults race in the afternoon's stronger sea breeze.

The season calendar shows how the intake works. For 2025-26, adult racing began on 14 September with a fortnight of warm-up races, while new adult and junior sailors, plus returning juniors and adults learning the sport, were brought in together from 19 October — registration for newcomers having been held in the Beach Bar on opening day. Racing paused after 21 December for the Christmas break, resumed on 18 January and wrapped up on 25 April. New sailors of any age are welcomed into that October intake, which effectively functions as the club's learn-to-sail gateway: adults learning alongside juniors, absorbed into divisions that race every week.

There's no accredited sailing centre or keelboat course here — instruction is club-run and volunteer-delivered, in the manner of the skiff clubs from which Yarra Bay descends. What it offers instead is continuity and community: a child can start in a Sabot on a Sunday morning and, a decade later, be trapezing a Cherub in the afternoon division without ever leaving the club. The licensed clubhouse completes the loop — sailing families spend the whole Sunday at the beach, juniors racing in the morning, seniors in the afternoon, everyone converging on the bistro and the live music when the boats are away.

Yarra Bay is a gentle crescent of beach on the northern shore of Botany Bay at Phillip Bay, a pocket of relative calm between La Perouse and the container terminals. The club's address is Yarra Road — ten minutes from Sydney Airport, five from the Eastern Suburbs Memorial Park — and the licensed clubhouse looks directly over the bay, with generous car and bus parking and that courtesy bus for the evenings. Few Sydney sailing venues combine open-water racing with a waterfront restaurant literally upstairs.

The racing water is Botany Bay proper, what the club's history calls the open water sailing of the historic bay. Conditions differ markedly from the harbour clubs further north: the bay is broad and shallow, sea breezes arrive early and strong across its fetch, and the wave patterns are its own. That said, the bay a Yarra Bay crew races on today is not the bay of 1928.

The club's own history records that runway extensions for the airport, the oil refineries and the Port Botany container terminal took a massive bite out of the bay and permanently altered its waves and tidal flows. Modern sailors race with container ships swinging at their berths as backdrop — an industrial amphitheatre that has become oddly picturesque in its own right.

For juniors, the inshore water off the beach is forgiving: shallow, flat in a nor'-easter, and quickly reached by rescue boat. The afternoon senior fleets range wider across the bay, into the chop and the shipping channel edges. And when the sailing's done, the shore side of the equation is arguably the best appointed of any small club in Sydney — a hundred-seat restaurant, the Beach Bar, a function auditorium and live music on Sunday afternoons, all looking out over the water the club has sailed for nearly a century.

The club was born of another club's collapse. When the Botany Flying Squadron's racing fleet disbanded for want of numbers in January 1928, its sailors regrouped on Yarra Bay, basing themselves at Howes boatshed and putting seven boats on the water that first season in what contemporaries described as a picnic atmosphere. The club was formally constituted in February 1928, and a social committee elected that March set about fundraising for expansion. Through the 1930s the club progressed steadily, buying a number of 16ft skiffs of its own.

War didn't stop the building. A Crown land lease for a clubhouse site was secured around 1940, the building went up with voluntary labour — including help from members of the St George club — and opened in 1941, the same year the club joined the NSW Skiff Association, beginning a close relationship with the association and its Southern Zone clubs that continues today. In 1967 the club incorporated as a company, a move its own history wryly notes finally legitimised the wide range of social activities it had practised for years.

Yarra Bay hosted numerous skiff carnivals and national and international regattas over the decades; one that stands out in the club's memory is the Bi-Centennial Regatta of January 1988, sailed alongside the First Fleet Re-enactment in the bay where the real First Fleet had first anchored. But the 16ft class itself was fading — interest had peaked in the 1970s, and rising costs, the lack of international competition and the spread of smaller dinghy classes saw the skiffs eventually disappear from the club's racing.

The response was reinvention: the clubhouse evolved into a licensed community venue whose restaurant, bars and functions now sustain the senior and junior sailing divisions. Ninety-odd years on, the club still publishes its annual financial report publicly, still fields its Sunday divisions, and still welcomes visitors with the picnic-atmosphere warmth its founders claimed in 1928.