Cronulla Sailing Club

About Cronulla Sailing Club

Cronulla Sailing Club is a sailing club located in Cronulla, NSW. The organisation publishes a website and appears to operate as a local sailing/yacht club offering club activities and organised sailing programs for members and visitors.

It appears on Australian Sailing's 2026-27 affiliation update in Band 12. Public contact information is available via phone, email, website.

Training and sailing programs

The most distinctive thing in Cronulla's teaching program is that adults can learn to sail on a yacht. The Adult Learn to Sail stream for over-16s offers "Start Crewing" — four weekly three-hour sessions aboard a Beneteau yacht or a J24 with an instructor on board, following the Australian Sailing keelboat pathway. For a club with serious ocean and J24 racing, it's a smart piece of pipeline engineering: graduates arrive already fluent in the boats the club actually races. A parallel dinghy stream, Start Sailing 1, runs over six two-hour sessions using the club's NS14, MG and Laser dinghies.

Junior Learn to Sail follows the Australian Sailing-endorsed sequence — Start Sailing 1, Start Sailing 2 and Better Sailing — led by accredited instructors on Sunday mornings and during school holidays. The club's "In the Bay" fleet gives juniors their own racing ecosystem inside Gunnamatta Bay: Bic O'pen Skiffs, Optimists and Manly Juniors sailing triangle courses that mix training and racing, so the transition from student to racer happens almost without noticing.

Beyond the courses, the infrastructure keeps graduates sailing. Club Lasers are available for hire for weekly racing, lowering the ownership barrier, and the junior and training fleets share the sheltered bay while seniors race the wider estuary. Junior training has been integral to the club since the Heron class was brought in decades ago specifically to encourage families — a deliberate broadening of the club's base that today's programs continue. The through-line is unmistakable: teach people in the boats they'll race, on the water they'll race on, and they'll stay.

Club history

The story starts with the Port Hacking VJ Amateur Sailing Club, which first raced on Gunnamatta Bay in 1934 with no clubhouse at all — dinghies lived in private boatsheds around the bay. Racing was patchy through the war years of 1939–45, but the postwar boom put as many as 30 VJs on the water each Sunday in 1948. Two large wartime huts in Willarong Road, formerly a RAAF radar station, came into the club's hands, and members dismantled them, hauled them to the present site and reassembled them with modifications — an act of self-reliance that set the club's tone.

In 1948 the Cronulla VS Sailing Club was formed for graduates of the junior VJ years, building its own clubhouse beside the VJs' in 1951. When declining numbers in both classes forced the issue, the two amalgamated in 1963 as Cronulla Sailing Club, incorporated with limited liability. The Moth class arrived and promptly produced the club's greatest champion: David McKay won two Moth World Titles in 1969 and 1970, and later became a leading J24 sailor, taking out the NSW J24 championship at a Cronulla-hosted regatta aboard McKay Marine. The Heron came in expressly to encourage families, and junior training became established — and remains integral.

Come 1980 the ex-Air Force huts were both too small and deteriorating; with Sutherland Shire Council assistance and a Department of Sport and Recreation grant and loan, a new clubhouse was built, officially opened on 13 December 1981. A decade later, in December 1991, the Port Hacking Ocean Yacht Club — itself formed in 1964 for deep-keel yachts — merged in, completing the all-classes club. In 2026 the club convened general meetings to adopt a new constitution for Cronulla Sailing Club Limited, governance catching up with ninety years of sailing.