Newcastle Cruising Yacht Club

About Newcastle Cruising Yacht Club

Newcastle Cruising Yacht Club (NCYC) in Wickham, NSW is a waterfront sailing club offering organised sailing programs, a sailing academy (junior and adult courses, powerboat and instructor courses), marina facilities with multiple marina arms and visitor information, and a clubhouse with dining and function spaces. The club precinct also includes a boatyard/shipyard and maintenance facilities and a commercial centre.

The club is associated with the Newcastle Harbour sailing area. Directory classification: Mixed. Commonly listed classes or sailing focus include Keelboats. Current sailing-directory information indicates junior or learn-to-sail activity. It appears on Australian Sailing's 2026-27 affiliation update in Band 7. Public contact information is available via phone, email, website.

Training and sailing programs

SheSAILS is the program that put this club's training philosophy on the national map. Founded at NCYC by Jan Howard and Mary Holley, both veterans of the Sydney Hobart, it won Australian Sailing's inaugural National SheSAILS Award in 2019, the same year the governing body adopted the brand nationally. SheSAILS@NCYC now delivers formally recognised women's sail training, all-female regatta campaigns, its own SheSAILS Open Regatta and study groups, and more than 200 women passed through female-specific keelboat training in the 2021–22 year alone.

Around that flagship sits a full-scale Sailing Academy operating six days a week across keelboats, powerboats and Tackers dinghies, all year round. NCYC has held Australian Sailing Discover Sailing Centre accreditation since 2014, and the governing body's 2022 figures placed it first among National Keelboat Program centres nationwide, fourth among Discover Sailing Centres and tenth among Tackers centres.

The course menu runs from Give Sailing a Try sessions through Junior Tackers for 7–12s, the Youth OutThere Program for 11–17s, adult courses, skill development, community and corporate sailing, powerboat and instructor courses, and masterclasses. Three Development Regattas — open, women's and youth — give graduates a first taste of around-the-buoys racing, while a SailPass option for first-timers converted roughly 30 per cent of users into full members, a conversion that helped lift overall membership by nearly a third during 2022.

The club also hosts the Making Waves Foundation's Newcastle base and runs a veterans program alongside Saltwater Veterans, so the pathway in is open to just about anyone.

Club history

A small group of enthusiastic sailors founded the club in 1994, incorporating on 19 April that year, and the growth since has been brisk enough to fill a book — literally. "Setting Sail: The First 25 Years", written by retired inaugural commodore Paul Hannan together with life member Gloria Thirkell, was launched at the 25th anniversary celebrations in July 2019, the same month the club unveiled its eight-strong fleet of Elliott 6 one-design keelboats at a members-only anniversary regatta. That year also brought the first NSW/ACT Club of the Year award, national recognition for the newly founded SheSAILS, and the revival of the Newcastle Regatta as SailFest, drawing boats from as far afield as Port Macquarie, Lake Macquarie, Port Stephens and Sydney.

Individual stories anchor the institutional ones. Jim Holley — a founding member, former commodore and veteran of 25 Sydney Hobart campaigns — was honoured in 2019 with the renaming of the club's Steber 36 start boat after him. The Elliott fleet launched what the club called "a new era of one-design racing for the Hunter", later feeding into the Hunter Sailing League started in 2022 to bring the region's best teams together, and the Sailing Champions League Asia Pacific now runs as part of SailFest.

Perpetual trophies record the club's internal lore — the Allen Fairhall "Gun Boat Trophy" for line honours, the Founders Bowl, the NCYC Cup, the Mick Eggleston Trophy and the Thirkell Match Racing Trophy — and the club journal, Thirty-Two Fifty-Five, keeps the stories circulating. For a club barely three decades old, the cabinet fills quickly.