Port Stephens Yacht Club

About Port Stephens Yacht Club

Port Stephens Yacht Club is a local yacht and sailing club based in Soldiers Point, NSW. The club appears to run organised sailing and boating activities for members and visitors. A website is listed for more details.

The club is associated with the Port Stephens sailing area. Directory classification: Mixed. Commonly listed classes or sailing focus include Keelboats, Dinghies. Current sailing-directory information indicates junior or learn-to-sail activity. It appears on Australian Sailing's 2026-27 affiliation update in Band 14. Public contact information is available via phone, email, website.

Training and sailing programs

Welcoming people onto the water who might never otherwise get there is where Port Stephens Yacht Club's program stands apart. Its Women on Water gatherings give female sailors a dedicated pathway into the fleet, and a collaboration with Invictus Australia has opened the club's boats to veterans — an initiative the flag officers have championed alongside the broader PSYC Training Academy, which Commodore Margaux Everett has named a key focus for building participation. Structured junior dinghy tuition, it should be noted, is handled elsewhere on the waterway, by the Bay Sailing Centre at Salamander Bay, leaving PSYC to concentrate on what it does best: getting people racing keelboats.

The on-water ladder is deep and steady. Saturday racing splits into spinnaker and non-spinnaker pointscores, so crews can step up at their own pace, while Wednesday afternoon non-spinnaker racing and the Friday D'Albora Twilight Series offer gentler entry points for new skippers and fresh crew alike. Beyond the bay, the Inshore/Offshore Series and the Zhik marathon and sprint races take sailors out through the heads, and the late-December Broughton Island Cruise introduces the cruising side of the sport.

Across the year the program tallies roughly thirty pointscore races, six Commodore's Trophy races, nine inshore/offshore events and around twenty-one twilight races, plus standalone fixtures such as the Jack Hollman Race. For a sailor arriving with no boat and no experience, the route from rail-meat to regular crew is well worn — and the club's older hands, some with twenty-five or more seasons on local waters, are generous with what they know.

Club history

The club's own telling begins in 1971, when the Port Stephens Yacht Squadron was formed at Soldiers Point and small, keen local fleets started racing in what the club recalls as a grassroots and spirited scene. A second strand of the story, preserved on the club's Berman Trophy page, records Max and Edna Berman hosting a meeting at their East Maitland home on 31 March 1972 that gathered eleven founding members to establish the Soldiers Point Yacht Club, with Max Berman — a local builder — elected first Commodore.

Rather than a contradiction, the two dates read as the Squadron's early seasons and the formal building of its home: Berman did the groundwork that secured the land lease, a NSW Government grant and the development approval for the clubhouse. Club records also show the company behind the club registered in September 1997, and the Soldiers Point connection has endured on official documents ever since.

In 2003 the Squadron became Port Stephens Yacht Club, a change the club credits with giving it a central harbour presence and reach into a wider sailing community. Memory is honoured in the silverware: Edna Berman, longtime editor of the club magazine Quadrant, left $1,500 on her death in 1996, the interest funding prizes for the family-oriented non-spinnaker race that became the Max and Edna Race. The modern era has added brighter chapters.

In February 2022 the club welcomed solo circumnavigator Jeanne Socrates into its Saturday race at the helm of Cherylle Stone's Subzero; in 2025 the double-handed Open 40 Roaring Forty flew the PSYC banner in the Rolex Sydney Hobart for charity; and that same year Margaux Everett, a sailor of more than twenty years across SASC, RPAYC and PSYC, was appointed the club's first female Commodore, with Richard Kerr as her Vice Commodore.