Concord & Ryde Sailing Club

About Concord & Ryde Sailing Club

Concord & Ryde Sailing Club (CRSC) is a family-oriented sailing club on the Parramatta River based at Bennelong Park, Putney. Sailing has run here since 1945 with organised dinghy and catamaran racing (fleet classes including Firebug, Catamaran, Heron, Moth, NS14, Paper Tiger, Spiral, Tasar) typically on Saturdays at 14:00 during the season (September–April). The club offers extensive training programs and Learn to Sail courses for juniors and adults, maintains a clubhouse and canteen (open Saturdays 09:00 during the season), and runs community events and development activities.

It appears on Australian Sailing's 2026-27 affiliation update in Band 14. Public contact information is available via phone, email, website.

Training and sailing programs

The signature here is a complete club-owned training ladder that lets a family arrive with nothing and end up racing. Junior Learn to Sail, for ages 8 to 15, runs across eight consecutive Saturday mornings — Start Sailing 1, Start Sailing 2 and Better Sailing, each an eight-week block from 9am to midday — at $345 per child, with member, returning-sailor and family discounts and Active Kids vouchers accepted. Beginners start in Optimists and graduate to Firebugs, all supplied by the club. School holiday camps compress the Start Sailing 1 module into three consecutive days for families who can't commit to a full term.

Adults and teens over 15 get their own stream in the club's Spiral dinghy fleet, backed up by club Moths, with a pathway into two-handed sailing in the club's Herons — an arrangement pitched squarely at families learning together. The clever part is the exit ramp: course graduates can keep using club dinghies for the rest of that season in Intermediate lunchtime races, free of any extra charge subject to availability, so nobody finishes a course and then stalls for want of a boat.

As an Australian Sailing-accredited Discover Sailing Centre, the club delivers outcome-based courses on the national syllabus with qualified trainers. SheSails sessions cater to women, SailPass covers the introductory membership step, and the Making Waves partnership extends the club's reach to sailors who might not otherwise find their way to a start line. The training fleet has been purpose-bought for decades — archives record JH8 dinghies purchased specifically for instruction. It's a system refined over sixty years, since the 1964 Cadet Division introduced the club's first formal learn-to-sail course in Manly Juniors.

Club history

In the winter of 1945, parents from the Yarralla Sea Scouts met in a Concord back room and resolved to start a sailing club; forty-odd adults attended. The new body was christened the Concord and Rhodes Open Sailing Club, becoming Concord & Ryde Sailing Club in 1960 — a name kept even when a mooted 50th-anniversary rebrand to "Ryde Sailing Club" was rejected over clashing initials.

The early fleet was a motley collection of home-built skiffs sailing from a reserve beside Ryde Bridge, boats wheeled to the water on hand carts and buoys laid by rowboat; with an on-course umpire watching, any infringement meant instant disqualification. Members built their own VJs — roughly a thousand screws apiece — and by 1950 about forty VJs and VSs were racing weekly in A and B Divisions. The club's first boatshed on Uhrs Point Reserve went up around 1952 under Clive Ellis's guidance.

Skates arrived in the late 1950s, then big fleets of Herons and NS14s. The club hosted the annual interclub Uhrs Point Regatta, the traditional season opener in the VJ Central Branch championship, and its early-1970s VJ fleet of 20-odd boats produced champions like Greg and Craig Fryer's Retroflect.

Trouble had been brewing since the late 1950s, when the club learned the Department of Main Roads had resumed its reserve for future bridgeworks. On 17 July 1986 — remembered as D-Day — the club was given three weeks to vacate — mid-boom, with 127 boats registered and Saturday fleets running 80 to 100 strong. After a season sailed off the beach at Kissing Point Park, a basic new building went up at the eleventh hour, swallowing the club's entire savings; the present Putney clubhouse opened in 1988. The club's 75th season fell in 2020–21, and eighty years on the river arrived in 2025, counting among its alumni America's Cup measurer Ken McAlpine and Tasar world podium finisher Warwick Wood.