Army Sailing Club - Association

About Army Sailing Club - Association

Army Sailing Club Association (ASCA) is a sailing club for serving Australian Defence members. The club operates the Army-owned yacht Rising Sun, moored in Sydney, and offers opportunities to sail (including twilight sails) and unit/branch experiential sailing training. Membership is available to serving Defence personnel; contact by email is provided.

It appears on Australian Sailing's 2026-27 affiliation update in Band 21. Public contact information is available via website.

Training and sailing programs

"Teach a soldier to sail and you teach them far more than sailing" might as well be the club's unofficial motto — its stated purpose centres on adventure training and experiential learning, using the sea to develop the leadership and resilience the Army needs. Newcomers need no experience whatsoever; the club undertakes to teach everything from the very first sail, and the syllabus is the ocean itself.

The numbers from the Gun Runner era show what that looks like at scale. Through more than seventy races a year — including the CYCA Blue Water Series and the Sydney Hobart — plus more than seventy-five days of offshore training on the east coast, the club and its yacht introduced over 200 soldiers annually to inshore and offshore sailing. Crews routinely included novices: the 2021 Sydney Hobart campaign carried as many as four first-timers in its eight-strong crew. That deliberate mixing of the experienced and the brand-new is the program's signature, turning every race into a leadership exercise.

The newer Rising Sun continues the model. The yacht is available to units and branches for experiential learning — a one-day sail for nine people, with a draft instruction template supplied — and her 2025 Hobart entry was structured as a formal training program cycling some sixty soldiers through Sydney-to-Melbourne passages. Membership brings an Australian Sailing number, as required across all affiliated clubs. There are no junior dinghy fleets or civilian learn-to-sail courses here, and none are needed: the club's students arrive as adults, often with sea time of a very different kind, and leave with offshore miles, race experience and a shared test of character behind them.

Club history

The club's founding date is not recorded in available sources, but its history can be told through the yachts that have carried its name south. The first Rising Sun — sail number 5376 — was a Morgan-Giles designed sloop launched in 1962, built at Garden Island by the Royal Australian Navy. Racing earlier as Franklin, with a first Hobart in 1965, she contested the 1993 Sydney Hobart for the Army Sailing Club under skipper Noel Sneddon, in a campaign linked to a program for disadvantaged children and carrying a sixteen-year-old school cadet among the crew.

The Jarkan 925 Gun Runner took over as the Australian Army yacht and made her first Rolex Sydney Hobart in 2017, finishing at the tail of the field under owner-skipper LTCOL Maurice Young. She returned in 2021 as the fleet's smallest boat at 9.2 metres, under skipper Murray Stewart with eight aboard including up to four novices; forced to retire, she replenished and sailed on to Hobart regardless. Between Hobarts she also lined up for the 2018 Noakes Sydney Gold Coast Yacht Race. In her prime, the yacht's program of seventy-plus annual races and seventy-five-plus days of offshore training was introducing more than 200 soldiers a year to the sport.

In 2025 a new Rising Sun joined the fleet, replacing Gun Runner, and immediately took on the Sydney Hobart as the centrepiece of a training program rotating around sixty soldiers across five offshore passages. The continuity across three yachts — Franklin's old hull, the little Jarkan, and now the new Rising Sun — shows a club that measures its history not in silverware but in the number of soldiers it has put to sea.