Chelsea Yacht Club

About Chelsea Yacht Club

Some clubs race; some clubs teach; Chelsea Yacht Club has spent more than eighty years refusing to choose between the two. Set directly on the Chelsea foreshore on Port Phillip's eastern shore, about forty minutes south-east of Melbourne, it is an off-the-beach dinghy and catamaran club where the clubhouse doors open straight onto the sand and kayakers, paddle boarders, windsurfers and swimmers share the membership categories with the racing fleet. The numbers behind the sailing are striking: sailors flying Chelsea colours have, by the club's own tally, accumulated two world crowns, 46 national titles and 130 Victorian championships. The most famous name attached is John Bertrand — the Australia II skipper, Olympic Finn bronze medallist and two-time Etchells world champion — who began here aged seven as a cadet alongside his brother Lex, and who holds Extraordinary Membership to this day. Yet the club's modern identity is as much social as competitive. Growth has been steady over recent years, a part-time paid club manager was appointed in 2019, and the calendar mixes racing with community dinners, live "music at the beach" sessions and functions in a room overlooking the bay. Signature events show the same breadth: the Four Of A Kind inter-class regatta with three decades behind it, an International Women's Day Regatta requiring at least one woman aboard every boat, and the Chelsea Classic for vintage and veteran dinghies and cats. It amounts to a club that takes its sailing seriously and itself lightly — a combination that has clearly worked for generations of bayside families.

Services

• Sailing club

Service area

Chelsea, VIC