Connells Point Sailing Club

About Connells Point Sailing Club

Connells Point Sailing Club is a local sailing club based in Connells Point, NSW. The club appears to offer organised sailing activities and member-focused programs; a website is listed for further information (https://cpsc.org.au/).

It appears on Australian Sailing's 2026-27 affiliation update in Band 19. Public contact information is available via phone, email, website.

Training and sailing programs

What stands out about Connells Point's junior program is how quickly it hands kids real racing. Junior Start Sailing courses cater to children from eight to fifteen, running from September onwards with all equipment provided and no experience needed, all under qualified Australian Sailing instructors. The syllabus covers the fundamentals — terminology, launching and returning, capsize recovery — but the pathway doesn't stop at competence: intermediate and confident sailors step straight into the club's afternoon racing, briefing at 1:15pm for a 2pm start, on the same day and the same water where they trained.

The training fleet has been refreshed with an eye to families. The club recently purchased two Pacer dinghies — sturdy 3.8-metre sloops that suit both instruction and parent-and-child sailing — and reports they're proving popular. They slot into a broader set of club-supported classes that lets a graduate pick a direction: single-handed in a Sabre or one of the Laser rigs, two-up in a Mirror or Heron, or three-sailed excitement in a Weta trimaran.

Programs for late teenagers and adults are available on request through the club's contact form rather than as fixed courses — a pragmatic arrangement for a volunteer club that matches instruction to demand. The junior end, though, is fully systematic, and the Optimist program has real depth: the club ran an Optimist regatta in 2016 and has staged team-racing and training events since, tapping into a class whose national fleet has quadrupled since 2007 by the club's own class notes. Sailors who come through that pipeline are racing nationals before they're out of school — the Roberts Mirror title is the proof.

Club history

The inaugural meeting was held in 1938, and by the 1940/41 season the club was racing formally with eight boats on the Georges River. In the early days every boat was a VJ-class skiff, and the VJ remained the dominant class until 1956. Members originally sailed straight out of backyard river access — Connells Point being the sort of peninsula suburb where plenty of houses back onto the water — until 1950, when a fund was established to buy a clubhouse and a £50 timber hut was acquired.

The classes that followed read like a survey of Australian dinghy sailing — Gwen 12s, Moths, Pelicans, Herons, NS14s, Lasers, Sabres, Flying 11s, Mirrors, Manly Juniors, Skyriders, Optimists — all raced under the club's burgee over the decades. The VJ era produced the club's first widely known sailor in Rex Bray, a top competitor of the 1960s whose VJs carried the name King Gee, and who ordered the first flaired-bow VJ hull Don Fairbrother built.

A turning point came in 1965, when the club received an allocation of land at its present Donnelly Park position; the first meeting there followed in 1966, and members extended the building in 1984 to add boat storage and meeting space. Everything since — clubhouse, rescue craft, start boat, the training fleet — has been paid for principally through rack fees, memberships, the canteen and social functions.

The club celebrated 75 years in 2013 with a reunion drawing members from across the decades, and its history records success at State and National titles, in Olympic campaigns and at World Championships. The most recent addition to that honour roll came in January 2026, when Hayley Roberts crewed Bob with Damian Carey to win the 58th International Mirror Class National Championship at Wynyard, Tasmania — six firsts and three seconds.