McCrae Yacht Club

About McCrae Yacht Club

Speed is written into McCrae Yacht Club's DNA. This is the Mornington Peninsula club that hosted four challenges for the Little America's Cup, that produced the world sailing speed record holder Yellow Pages Endeavour, and whose members were aboard the first sailing vessel ever to sustain more than fifty knots. Yet walk the hard on a Saturday in season and the scene is less exotic than that pedigree suggests: an off-the-beach club for dinghies and catamarans on the southern shore of Port Phillip, with no marina pens or keelboat moorings, where around 600 members put fleets of seventy or more boats on the water each weekend.

The scale sits comfortably alongside the family brief set at the founding in 1961 — the club's stated objective was to encourage sailing in all its forms in a way that involved the whole family, with gender and age expressly irrelevant. That principle shows up in the membership model: every member shares a duty-roster obligation, and more than a thousand duty slots are filled across a season, so the racing machine genuinely runs on its own people. The clubhouse on Point Nepean Road fronts a broad sandy beach between Rosebud and Dromana, with a lawn and deck overlooking the bay.

Class culture runs deep and wide — A-Class catamarans, Hobies, B14s, Contenders, Lasers, Tasars, Paper Tigers and Sabres all race here — and the club's championship hosting record stretches back almost unbroken to the 1962/63 season. McCrae is, in short, a big volunteer club with an international résumé, where a seven-year-old in an Optimist and a world champion in a Contender can rig within metres of each other.

Services

• Sailing club

Service area

McCrae, VIC