Brisbane 18 Footers Sailing Club

About Brisbane 18 Footers Sailing Club

Brisbane 18 Footers Sailing Club is a Queensland sailing or boating organisation associated with Tingalpa, QLD. It appears on Australian Sailing's 2026-27 Queensland affiliated-club schedule at Band 20, which provides a current governing-body verification signal. Brisbane 18 Footers Sailing Club appears to be a local sailing club based in Tingalpa, QLD. The organisation name indicates it runs a sailing club focused on 18-footers and member sailing activities. Contact, website and location data in this enriched record were retained from the source dataset and updated where a reliable current public source was located; source and verification columns show the evidence and remaining gaps.

Training and sailing programs

Development here means mentoring, not classroom syllabuses. The modern rebuild has centred on young crews guided by two substantial figures: Dave Hayter, a four-time national 14ft skiff champion, and Rob Brown, a former world champion, with a youth team fronted by Josh Sloman now actively campaigning. No Tackers or Discover Sailing Centre accreditation attaches to the club; grassroots junior sailing in its orbit runs through Brisbane Sailing Squadron at Bulimba Point, leaving the 18 Footers free to concentrate on their speciality — converting talented youngsters into capable skiff sailors.

Fleet-building through design is in the club's DNA: back in 1959 it commissioned Norman Wright Jr and Bob Miller — the latter later famous as Ben Lexcen — to draw a boat expressly to rebuild the club fleet, and the radical three-handed chine skiff Taipan resulted. The present racing program runs in three strands. Modern 18ft skiffs compete on Waterloo Bay, launching from the Darling Point and Royal Queensland squadrons under arrangements dating from 2008.

Historical 10ft and 12ft skiffs keep the heritage fleet racing from Brisbane Sailing Squadron on the river. And hosting rounds out the picture: staging the 2025 nationals on Waterloo Bay returned the championship event to Queensland after 35 years away. Hayter's own 2023 skiff Big Foot Bags & Covers, eighth at the 2024 Giltinan worlds, marks the competitive standard the squad now chases.

For a young sailor weighing the pathway, the appeal is obvious: learn the ropes in dinghies on the river, graduate through the heritage skiffs, and step into one of the fastest monohull classes on the planet with a world champion looking over your shoulder.

Club history

The family tree begins in July 1895 with the City of Brisbane Sailing Club, which a year later hosted an interstate 18-footer contest won on home water by the newly built Britannia. Names changed as the organisation matured — Brisbane Flying Squadron from February 1900, Queensland Flying Squadron from August 1905 — before the body was reconstituted in 1920 under its present title, with J. Colin Clark and Lance Watts among the driving forces and a blue-and-red pennant bearing an "18" on its blue field.

The honour board from that period is formidable: Clark's Britannia secured the first official national championship held in Queensland, in 1917–18, and Clark, the Crouch brothers, Watts and ultimately Norman Wright Jr accumulated titles across four decades. Audacity peaked in 1932, when member Frederick Hart engaged builder Alf 'Toby' Whereat to construct Aberdare, the first heel-less seven-foot-beam skiff-type 18 footer. The design convulsed Sydney racing and directly triggered the 1935 birth of the NSW 18 Footers Sailing League.

Vic Vaughan steered the boat — sailors knew her as "the Galloping Ghost" — to four consecutive national crowns, and Queenslanders won 12 of the 15 championships contested between 1934 and 1953. In 1956 Wright's Jenny VI took the world 18-footer crown on Waterloo Bay, a Queensland first; Taipan and Venom then swept the 1961 worlds on the Brisbane River. Neville Buckley's six consecutive state titles in TraveLodge-sponsored boats extended the run into the 1970s before escalating technology costs closed it.

Revival stirred from about 2019 under Dave Hayter and crested in January 2025, when the national championship finally came home to Queensland.