Hervey Bay Sailing Club

About Hervey Bay Sailing Club

Hervey Bay Sailing Club is a Queensland sailing or boating organisation associated with Hervey Bay, QLD. It appears on Australian Sailing's 2026-27 Queensland affiliated-club schedule at Band 20, which provides a current governing-body verification signal. Hervey Bay Sailing Club is a community sailing club based at 427 Charlton Esplanade, Torquay (Hervey Bay), QLD. The club promotes off-the-beach sailing on the Fraser Coast, runs club racing, regattas and social events, and organises the annual Bay to Bay Trailerable Yacht Race.

The club website also lists membership information, contacts for race enquiries and a venue-hire contact for the clubhouse/boatshed. 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

The club's competitive identity rests on an unusually broad class spread for a regional beach club. Sabots, Herons, Tasars, Corsairs, MG14s and Lasers race from the foreshore alongside Cobra, A-Class, Nacra and Arrow catamarans, giving members progression paths from single-handed dinghies to high-performance cats without ever leaving the club.

Junior and adult learn-to-sail delivery on the Fraser Coast has recently been reshaped: the Fraser Coast Sailing Academy, a new commercial Discover Sailing Centre launched in 2025, now runs the Tackers junior pathway and adult courses with the stated aim of building membership at both Hervey Bay Sailing Club and Maryborough Sailing Club. The club also hosted one of the earliest 2025 regional roadshows run by Australian Sailing Queensland, placing it at the front of the state's club-development circuit. Results suggest the pipeline works: Max Rott and Alex Rott, sailing out of the club, took out the RS Feva title at the 2021 Queensland Youth Championships.

On the water, the program year revolves around club racing from the Torquay foreshore and the Bay to Bay, the two-day trailable-yacht passage race from Tin Can Bay up through the Great Sandy Strait that anchors the club calendar each May. Volunteer capability underpins everything. Long-serving member Colin Verrall received Australian Sailing Queensland's Solo Trophy in 2022 for more than two decades of outstanding service to the sport, and the club's race-management bench — honed through world, national and state championship hosting — is, in the club's own assessment, its quiet specialty and the foundation of its national standing.

Club history

A small group of local sailors formed the club in 1968, at a time when no sailing club existed anywhere in the area. For the first six seasons, headquarters consisted of a tent put up on the sand every Sunday — racing organised from canvas and beach. Permanence arrived in 1974, when the local council approved plans for a clubhouse on the current site — land first leased for surf-lifesaving purposes — and volunteers erected half of the boatshed before that year was out. The completed clubhouse followed in 1977, and the club marked the year by hosting Australian Catamaran Week.

The 1990–91 season brought the first Nacra Catamaran World Championship to the beach at Torquay, and in November 2018 the club hosted the A-Class World Championship together with the inaugural A-Class Classic World Championship — a double that underlined its standing with the catamaran classes.

Threaded through that history is the Bay to Bay. Club members conceived the race on 18 April 1980; the first running, in May 1981, drew 114 boats against an expected thirty, with Rob McWatters of Rockhampton taking line honours in a Seawind 24 catamaran. The 19th edition in 1999 set the record fleet at 230 trailable yachts, and the race now runs each year on the first weekend of May.

Individual service has been recognised alongside event success: Colin Verrall's 2022 Solo Trophy honoured more than twenty years of contribution to Queensland sailing. From a Sunday tent to world championship hosting in a little over two decades, the club's trajectory mirrors the growth of Hervey Bay itself — and the tent-to-clubhouse story remains central to how the club tells its own story to new members.