McCrae Yacht Club

McCrae Yacht Club is an off-the-beach sailing club on the southern shore of Port Phillip, at McCrae on the Mornington Peninsula. Boats launch straight off the sand into the bay, and the club's fleets are dinghies and high-performance catamarans rather than moored keelboats. Founded in 1961, it has built a reputation as one of Victoria's most active off-the-beach clubs, with a deep junior-training programme and a long record of hosting state, national and international championships.

The club

McCrae is a dinghy and catamaran club, not a keelboat club — a distinction worth being clear about, because the brief that pointed us here suggested otherwise. There are no marina pens or big-boat moorings. Instead, crews rig on the hard, walk or dolly their boats down a broad sandy beach, and launch directly into Port Phillip. That format shapes everything about the place: shallow-draught boats, quick turnarounds, and a strong emphasis on fleet racing close to shore.

The current fleets are a good snapshot of Australian off-the-beach sailing. Catamarans are well represented, with A Class and Hobie classes prominent, and the club has strong single-handed and two-handed dinghy racing across B14, Contender, Laser (now the ILCA), Taser, Paper Tiger and Sabre. Junior pathways run through Pacer, Minnow and Optimist classes. The club is an approved Sail Training Establishment, and much of its identity is built on getting families and young sailors onto the water.

For a Grand Prix campaign, a club like McCrae is a reminder of where a lot of the best boat-handling comes from. Dinghy and catamaran sailors learn feel, weight placement and gear management the hard way, in boats that punish hesitation. Plenty of keelboat crews around Port Phillip cut their teeth at clubs exactly like this one.

History

McCrae Yacht Club was established on 29 December 1961. Within a few years it had grown into a recognised part of the Victorian sailing scene, becoming a full member of the Victorian Yachting Council — now Yachting Victoria — in 1966. From the early 1960s onward the club took on a run of championship events, and it has hosted class regattas at state, national and international level with unusual consistency for a club of its size.

One thread in that history stands out: McCrae's connection to the C-Class catamaran and the International C-Class Catamaran Championship, better known as the Little America's Cup. The club has a documented association with C-Class racing and with the pursuit of outright sailing speed, which is a striking heritage for a beach club and speaks to the technical ambition that has run through its catamaran fleets. We'd treat the finer detail of specific results as club-history material best confirmed directly with McCrae, but the broad picture — a club that has punched well above its weight in high-performance multihull sailing — is clear from its own record.

Where it sails

The club sits on Port Phillip near McCrae, at the southern end of the bay on the Mornington Peninsula side. This is the sheltered, inside water of the bay, not Bass Strait or the open ocean — an important point, because McCrae faces into Port Phillip rather than out to the coast.

Sailing here means working with Port Phillip's particular character. The bay is large and relatively shallow, which builds a short, steep chop quickly when the breeze is up, and the sea state can change markedly with wind direction and tide. Southerly and south-westerly changes bring the pressure that off-the-beach fleets love, while lighter, shiftier days reward sailors who read the water and the shoreline. For a fuller picture of the conditions, currents and seasonal patterns across the bay, see our guide to sailing in Melbourne and Port Phillip.

McCrae's position on the southern shore puts it in good company. Just along the coast is Blairgowrie Yacht Squadron, and the same body of water hosts the larger keelboat operation at Sandringham Yacht Club on the eastern shore. Together they give a sense of how varied Port Phillip sailing is, from beach-launched dinghies to offshore-capable keelboats, all on the one bay.

Racing

McCrae runs a full club racing programme through the sailing season, which on Port Phillip typically runs from spring into autumn — broadly October to April. A normal weekend combines junior training with club racing across the various fleets, and the beach-launch format keeps the racing tight and close to home.

Beyond club racing, McCrae's calling card is championship hosting. The club regularly stages class titles at state and national level, and its catamaran and dinghy fleets in particular draw significant regatta traffic. If you want to follow what's on, the club's own website and its regatta pages are the authoritative source; class championship schedules move around the country from year to year, so it's worth checking the current season rather than relying on any fixed assumption.

For anyone based around Port Phillip who wants to get into the sport, an off-the-beach club is one of the most accessible entry points there is — low cost of entry, plenty of second-hand boats, and a racing format that teaches fast. If that's you, our guides on how to get into sailing in Australia and how to join a yacht racing crew are a good place to start.