Manning River Sailing Club

About Manning River Sailing Club

Manning River Sailing Club appears to be a local sailing/yacht club based in Taree, New South Wales. The organisation likely runs organised sailing activities and member programs typical of a sailing club, but no website or detailed service listing was provided in the available record.

It appears on Australian Sailing's 2026-27 affiliation update in Band 22. Public contact information is available via phone.

Training and sailing programs

Junior development is the thread that has held this club together for more than half a century. Back in 1968–69, forward-thinking parents went looking for a proper training boat for young children, and the result was the Manning River Sabot Sailing Club, officially begun in 1969 and sailing off the bank at Fotheringham Park. The Sabot was chosen specifically as a nursery class to feed the VJ racing fleet, and the two clubs worked side by side — most parents had children in each class — until they amalgamated in 1979. That deliberate pathway, small trainer into lively two-hand racing dinghy, produced state and national champions and at least one Olympian.

The training role remains formalised today: the Taree Aquatic Club's risk management manual records that junior sail training for the district is carried out by Manning River Sailing Club Inc. A current weekly racing schedule and class list are not published, but the river's recent sailing instructions reference VSs, MGs, NS14s, Flying 11s, Manly Juniors and trailer yachts alongside the traditional VJs and Sabots, so the junior who learns here graduates into a genuinely varied local scene.

The club's most distinctive modern program is its support of Sailability Manning River Taree, a volunteer-run, not-for-profit branch of Sailability NSW operating with the club's backing. Using stable one- and two-seater yachts designed not to tip, the branch offers recreational, therapeutic and competitive sailing to people with disability, and the club has built a disabled access ramp so participants can reach all areas and facilities. It is a natural extension of the family-club ethos: sailing here has always been about getting the next person onto the water, whatever their age or circumstance.

Club history

Sailing on the Manning predates the club by decades. The Manning River Rowing and Sailing Club ran events from at least 1889, including the wildly popular Croki Boxing Day regattas, before winding up the regattas in 1934 and folding in 1937. The modern lineage begins in 1946, when Vee Jays first appeared on the river, sailing alongside the 16-footers and Vee-Ess from the North Coast Steam Ship Company wharf where the boats were housed; among the early VJs were "Rusher" and "Swan", the latter built by local identity Mr Ray Wine.

By about 1950 the VJs had shifted into a modest shed beside the wharf — lost to the 1954 flood — and in 1956 the boats shifted into the lower section of a new clubhouse near Martin Bridge, built with public funds.

Competition meant travel in those years. Manning boats raced at Gosford and Teralba, where scratch boats from the river were given twelve-to-fifteen-minute handicaps by the so-called country club sailors, and qualifying for state titles meant trips to Northern Zone venues from the Hawkesbury to Brisbane. Garry Hobson and Leigh Davidson won the 1969–70 VJ Senior State Championship in "Sigma" the hard way, and the formation of the North Coast Branch on 31 July 1974 — incorporating Cundletown, Great Lakes and the Manning club — finally ended the long-distance qualifying burden.

The Sabot club commenced in 1969, and when speedboats made town sailing dangerous, a joint VJ–Sabot submission to the Commonwealth R.E.D. Scheme funded a new clubhouse at Shallow Island, commenced in 1977. The clubs amalgamated in 1979, and by the mid-1980s, following a lean patch, 22 VJs and 20 Sabots were sailing regularly. The decade's centrepiece was the 1984–85 Australian VJ Championships at Taree — the class's 50th anniversary, sponsored solely by Volvo Australia, with regatta headquarters in the club's main hall.