Port Hacking Open Sailing Club

About Port Hacking Open Sailing Club

Port Hacking Open Sailing Club appears to be a community sailing club based in Yowie Bay, NSW, offering organised sailing activities and member-focused club programs. A website is listed for contact and further details.

It appears on Australian Sailing's 2026-27 affiliation update in Band 20. Public contact information is available via phone, email, website.

Training and sailing programs

Coaching here works on the club's own community terms: adult and junior teaching sessions run whenever sufficient numbers make them viable, and individual coaching can be arranged for sailors who ask. There is no rigid academy structure — instead, the club folds instruction into its weekly rhythm and leans on its class mix to do the developing. The junior ladder runs through three proper trainers: Optimists for the smallest sailors, Manly Juniors as the classic two-up next step, and Flying 11s for teenagers ready for a livelier boat.

From there, graduates feed naturally into the senior fleet of Herons and NS14s, with BIC O'pen Skiffs and Sabres offering alternative routes and a small open class accommodating dinghies that fit no other box. It is a pathway refined over decades, and it suits a club that measures success in families sailing together rather than in academy intakes.

Accessibility is taken seriously. Beginners are welcome from age five upwards, membership is open to every level of experience, and the club accepts NSW Active Kids vouchers, taking the sting out of junior registration costs for local families. Racing runs weekly on Sunday afternoons through a September-to-April season, so learners quickly find themselves in real fleets with experienced hands around them — the oldest and still one of the most effective sailing classrooms.

There is no Discover Sailing Centre accreditation here, and Tackers has never featured on the program; its teaching remains member-driven, scaled to whoever turns up wanting to learn. What it lacks in formality it makes up in continuity: generations of Shire sailors have come through exactly this route, from a first nervous session in an Opti to racing an NS14 for a state pennant, and the 2025 champion-club trophy suggests the system still works rather well.

Club history

Established in 1945 by sailors intent on reuniting their community after the war, the club has a founding purpose unusually explicit for an Australian sailing club — healing through shared time on the water. Racing has been conducted regularly on the enclosed waters of Port Hacking ever since, giving PHOSC an unbroken competitive thread stretching back eighty years. The club's long grip on the Yowie Bay foreshore shows up in the historical record in prosaic but telling ways: when Sutherland Shire Council considered reclamation works in the bay as an extension of Kareena Park in 1977, the minutes noted the need for a new rigging area for the sailing club, treating its presence as a given.

The modern club has formalised its identity while keeping the community brief. Port Hacking Open Sailing Club Inc. holds two ASIC-registered business names — Port Hacking Sailing, and the fuller Port Hacking Sailing Club — styles itself the pioneer of sailing in the Shire, and during the pandemic registered as a NSW Government COVID-Safe business to keep sailing running safely.

Competitive highlights have accumulated along the way, with the standout recent result the 2025 running of the Vic Hammond pennant, a trophy awarded to the strongest NS14 club across the state, and fitting recognition for a fleet that has made the Northbridge Senior its own. Individual members have stepped onto bigger stages too, none more visibly than junior Lauren Gray, who carried the club's colours alongside Team USA at the 2021 Sydney Harbour SailGP's Inspire Program and finished on the podium with Olympic sailor Nina Curtis.

From post-war reconstruction to state pennants and SailGP podiums, the club's arc has stayed true to its founding idea: sailing as the thing that holds a community together.