Nowra Community Sailing Club

About Nowra Community Sailing Club

Nowra Community Sailing Club appears to be a local sailing club based in Nowra, NSW. The club’s name and listed website indicate it is community-focused and likely organises sailing activities and member programs for recreational sailors in the Nowra area.

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

Training and sailing programs

The most distinctive thing about sailing at Nowra is that nobody gets left behind on the course — literally. Races are sailed as laps, so slower boats and less confident racers simply complete fewer laps yet still finish with the fleet, with times adjusted through a modified Victorian Yachting Council yardstick tuned to the club's courses and to international yardsticks where Finns and Lasers race in numbers.

Fold in the integrated Hansa boats and you get a racing format where a first-timer, a seasoned Finn sailor and a sailor with a disability all share the same start and the same finish. The club's Marathon race doubles as a heat of the Spiral class Travellers Trophy, giving members a taste of inter-club competition on home water and drawing visiting sailors up the river each January.

Formal accredited courses are not the club's way; learning here is personal and informal. The club cheerfully asserts that almost anyone of any age can learn to sail in a day or two, and prospective sailors are invited to get in touch with members Bill Jauncey or Wayne Norris and arrange a Saturday out on the water. That apprenticeship model suits a club whose strength is experienced sailors with time to give. Sailing happens on selected Saturdays from mid-October, starting at 2.15 in the afternoon, with the season program posted each September.

The 2015 Hansa regatta, run alongside Hansa Sailing Systems, the Sailing for Everyone Foundation and Sailability Shoalhaven, showed how naturally the club's inclusive instincts scale up when the occasion demands.

Club history

The club's first home was older than the club by the better part of a century. The weatherboard building and timber wharf beside the Nowra bridge began life serving the Illawarra Steamship Navigation Company — council dates the original to the 1880s, when it stored goods moving between Nowra and Sydney, while a Transport for NSW heritage assessment puts the surviving Inter-War Federation structure at 1930, after the company set up an office there following 1904.

Goods had moved overland to Greenwell Point and on by steamer until 1903, when the river was blasted to open a safe passage for steamers up to Nowra. The Nowra Fishing Co-op occupied the premises from the mid-1940s, trading into the 1960s.

The sailing club's lease of the building and wharf was approved in 1964, and Nowra Sailing Club was established at the site that year, with the old storehouse spending the next five decades as the town's sailing headquarters and its informal flood gauge. It survived two World Wars and countless floods, but on Wednesday 21 June 2017 fire broke out and destroyed it completely; mercifully, the club's gear happened to be out of the building that day.

The heritage-listed supporting piles, more than a hundred years old, remained, and council's Nowra Sails project transformed the site into the public precinct that opened in 2021. Through it all the club never stopped sailing, and events like the January Marathon — a Spiral Travellers Trophy heat — and the memory of that 30-boat Hansa regatta keep the racing tradition alive on the river.