Newport Cruising Yacht Club

About Newport Cruising Yacht Club

Newport Cruising Yacht Club is a Queensland sailing or boating organisation associated with Redcliffe Peninsula, northern Moreton Bay and Deception Bay (Scarborough / Newport / Kippa-Ring). It appears on Australian Sailing's 2026-27 Queensland affiliated-club schedule at Band 19, which provides a current governing-body verification signal. Newport Cruising Yacht Club is a community sailing club based on the Redcliffe Peninsula (Scarborough/Newport area) north of Brisbane.

The club runs regular sailing events (Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, including SAGS and WAGS pursuit races) on the northern end of Moreton Bay and Deception Bay, and meets at a clubhouse (current clubhouse access from Klingner Road, Kippa-Ring) after events for social activities and member support including crewing and cruising enquiries. 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 engine of the club week is pursuit racing, and Newport runs two flavours of it: WAGS — Wednesday Afternoon Good Sailing — and SAGS, the Saturday equivalent. In a pursuit format the handicaps are applied at the start rather than the finish, so boats depart at staggered times and, when the handicapper gets it right, converge at the line together — which at Newport happens quite deliberately, so that presentations can follow in the clubhouse while the afternoon is still warm.

Around that core the club has assembled a set of traditions with memorable acronyms: the RUMS series, and Cruising At Sunset — CAS — a relaxed Friday-afternoon race every couple of months that flows straight into dinner. Cruising-in-company trips to regional destinations cater for members who prefer anchorages to buoys. The annual calendar is crowded: the NCYC Regatta, the Rolly Hill Short Handed Race, the Lucinda Bay Classic, the Lady Skippers' Yacht Race, a Single Handed Yacht Race, the NCYC Marathon, Australia Day Sailing and the Labour Day Sprints, with a spinnaker race series reintroduced in early 2024.

Handicapping runs through a performance system documented in the Members' Handbook, giving the mixed fleet fair racing across the season. What the club does not currently advertise is a formal learn-to-sail arm — no Discover Sailing accreditation or structured junior course appears in the material available — and the 2021 clubhouse project was explicitly framed by then-Commodore Bolek Sulikowski as a way to enable more formal training alongside social gatherings.

Newcomers, in other words, learn by sailing with the fleet, and the forgiving pursuit format is built to make that work.

Club history

The club sails today as Newport Cruising Yacht Club, but it began life as the Moreton Bay Yacht Club, and exactly when that original club was founded is a detail the record has so far declined to surrender — the members' handbook documents the name change while leaving the founding date unstated. What can be traced clearly is the club's long hunt for a home.

For years it had no permanent base and rented space where it could; the 2018 edition of the Members' Handbook places the clubhouse at the Compass Marinas premises at Scarborough Harbour, with access off Reef Point Esplanade. The decisive move came in 2021, when the club erected its first permanent clubhouse, a $205,000 build beside the canals near Talobilla Park.

The funding package was a model of community-club resourcefulness: $127,000 from the Queensland Government's Get Going Places and Spaces program, $22,900 from the Moreton Bay Regional Council and a $50,000 interest-free council loan, with completion expected in July 2021. Bolek Sulikowski served as Commodore through the project, with Gerardine Young as treasurer, and Sulikowski framed the new building as the key to more formal training and social gatherings — the club's ambitions finally given walls and a roof.

Community partnerships have grown alongside the bricks and mortar: the club supports the Redcliffe Coast Guard onshore, receives on-water assistance from QF3, and counts local firms — the Sea Salt & Vine Café, Scarborough Pest Control and Dirty Boat Bottoms among them — as backers. For a club that spent decades renting, the Klingner Road clubhouse marks the point at which Newport Cruising Yacht Club became a permanent fixture of peninsula sailing.