Hunters Hill Sailing Club

About Hunters Hill Sailing Club

Hunters Hill Sailing Club is a volunteer-run, family-oriented sailing club on Sydney Harbour at Woolwich (Hunters Hill area). The club runs Learn2Sail programs, junior and youth training, holiday camps and adult learn-to-sail courses, organises racing across multiple dinghy and sailboard classes, provides boat storage (racks and an adjacent cage), and offers its clubhouse for venue hire. The club emphasises youth development and community participation and posts events and course details on its website.

The club is associated with the Sydney Harbour sailing area. Directory classification: Dinghy. Commonly listed classes or sailing focus include Optimist, ILCA, 29er. Current sailing-directory information indicates junior or learn-to-sail activity. It appears on Australian Sailing's 2026-27 affiliation update in Band 13. Public contact information is available via phone, email, website.

Training and sailing programs

The most distinctive thing HHSC teaches isn't a class or a course — it's the idea that sailing can reach kids other sports miss. The club runs "Ready, Set, Sail", a weekly resilience program supporting eleven students dealing with behavioural, attendance or mental-health challenges, and its partnership with Hunters Hill High School saw the school buy two RS Quest dinghies for a weekly Year 7 and 8 learn-to-sail program run as Tuesday afternoon sport. That schools-and-welfare strand fronts a pathway otherwise conventional in structure and unusually generous in delivery.

Entry starts with free Try Sailing sessions for seven-to-ten-year-olds — two Sunday mornings, boats and lifejackets provided — feeding into Learn2Sail, an Australian Sailing-accredited Optimist course with accredited coaches and three stages — Rookie, Momentum and Pro — with no time limit on progression. In-term lessons come bundled with annual membership, so families aren't paying coaching fees on top of joining. School-holiday camps in five-day and three-day formats run in spring, December and April, with a "Balmain Bus" shuttle from Elliot Street, Balmain for inner-west families, and Tweens and Teens camps put twelve-to-sixteen-year-olds into RS Quest and RS Zest dinghies for a racing twist: the basics of fleet, teams and match racing.

From there the competitive pathway is mapped in full: Transition to Green Fleet, then Green, Intermediate and Open Fleets in the Optimist — club boats available at first, own-boat commitment coming later — extending on to youth and Olympic classes. The club sails Optimists, Flying 11s, ILCAs, RS Quests and Zests plus 29ers, and a 2025 windsurfing reboot revives a board tradition that once sent RS:X sailors to open world championships. Events round it out: the Opti NSW Team Racing Championship, an "Optichicks" girls' weekend, interclub finals and a SheSails learn-to-foil clinic. Teenagers stay engaged coaching in Learn2Sail and RaceFleet — alumni teaching the intake.

Club history

The club began in 1961, launched as the Hunters Hill Junior Sailing Club and based at Onions Point where the Lane Cove River meets the Parramatta, and the "junior" in the name was the whole point — teaching kids to sail was the founding purpose, not an add-on. In 1971 the club shifted to its present Woolwich site at Clarkes Point, incorporating in 1986. Governance runs through a Management Committee elected at the AGM, with a Sailing Committee headed by the Commodore running racing and training — a structure that has carried the club through eras when membership waxed and waned from huge to flat.

The modern rebirth dates from the 2012 London Olympics' afterglow. January 2013 brought the club into the NSW Tackers launch, Yachting NSW financing a fleet of ten starter boats repayable over three years; fourteen kids and their families joined that first intake, coached by local sailing identity Jenni Bonnitcha with teenagers and university students supporting. Architect Julian Ashton helped drive the Optimist build-up as the family-membership model rebuilt numbers from around 120 to 249.

Results followed fast. By 2017 club juniors were taking first places at Australian championships and racing at European and world titles; the 2018 NSW Sailing Club of the Year award recognised the transformation. At the 2020 Optimist nationals held in Victoria, HHSC fielded the largest club contingent — some sixty travellers — and won a trophy typically claimed by home-state clubs.

That same year siblings Amelia and Matthew Quinlan (RS:X sailboard) and Sylvie Stannage (Laser Radial) contested the open world championships in Melbourne; Stannage went on to dominate ILCA 6 racing, winning the NSW & ACT Coast Championship repeatedly from 2023 to 2025 and contesting the 2025 Women's World Championships. Presidents Andrew Curtin, Maria Quinlan and Chris Stannage — the self-styled Chief Enthusiasm Officer — steered the rise.