Batemans Bay Sailing Club

About Batemans Bay Sailing Club

Batemans Bay Sailing Club is a local sailing club based in Batemans Bay, New South Wales. The club appears to run organised sailing activities and member-focused programs for recreational sailors in the Batemans Bay area. Website: https://bbsc.org.au/

The club is associated with the Eurobodalla sailing area. Directory classification: Keelboats / Dinghies. Current sailing-directory information indicates junior or learn-to-sail activity. It appears on Australian Sailing's 2026-27 affiliation update in Band 18. Public contact information is available via phone, email, website.

Training and sailing programs

The distinctive engine room here is the Off The Beach program on Coila Lake. Pitched explicitly at fun, friendly competition and skill development, it uses the lake's sheltered water as a training ground for juniors, families and sailors sharpening their racing craft, and it welcomes a wide range of dinghy classes rather than prescribing a single pathway boat. The 2025/26 season runs fortnightly on Sundays from late September to April, with a season pass of just $60 — pricing that says everything about the club's grassroots intent.

Beyond the lake, development happens through an unusually varied racing menu. The keelboat program spans the Bay Cup Series around the bay, the Coastal Cup Series along the coast between Moruya and Durras, and the Toll Gate Classic within the bay. A Women's Series runs as "Sternchaser" pursuit events with the slowest boats starting first, while the River Wranglers Friday twilight series races on the Clyde River between the marina and the bridge. Category 4 and Category 7 safety standards keep the coastal and inshore racing properly audited, and the club offers AMS and SMS measuring and handicapping in-house.

The club is honest about where it wants to grow. It maintains links with Sailability so people of all abilities can get afloat, and as of 2024 was working to establish a youth sailing connection with Moruya High School. Around Australia Day, club boats also head to Jervis Bay to join Jervis Bay Sailing Club's events, giving members experience of bigger fleets and unfamiliar water. For a club of its size, the development net is cast wide.

Club history

A small group of enthusiasts founded the club in 1974, wanting to take advantage of what they saw as the area's perfect sailing conditions. The earliest days survive mostly as fragments — all the original committee members had passed away by the time the club turned fifty — but the stories that remain are telling. A storm washed away the original clubhouse at Caseys Beach, forcing a rebuild at Hanging Rock off Corrigans Beach, where the club remains. And when rain struck a general meeting held in the still-roofless new clubhouse, members simply moved the meeting into one of their cars and carried on.

The 1990s were a high-water mark for the keelboat fleet, with 19 yachts competing in the late part of that decade. By 2024 the numbers had settled to around six boats in bay and Coila races, but the club's roughly seventy members kept the calendar remarkably full — a level of activity per member that long-serving Vice Commodore Lachlan Brown, about thirty years a member, points to with pride. The off-the-beach arm, organising racing for trailable dinghies and multihulls, has been part of the club for almost its entire life.

The fiftieth anniversary, celebrated across 25-27 October 2024, brought the threads together: a grand regatta, a birthday dinner and sailing across the club's home waters. Notable boats from the club's past, like Al Rosier's Rhubarb, were remembered alongside the modern program. Half a century on, the founding proposition hasn't changed — a small group of people who reckon the sailing here is as good as it gets, organised into a club that proves the point most weekends of the year.