Club History

How we started

The sailing club at Sheppey was set up by a band of enthusiastic sailors with big ideas in 1960.

They wanted enough land to accommodate a hundred boats and by chance the Sheerness Navy had just moved out of their Sheerness base.

An area which had been used for land defence training became a boat park, an old Country Club, previously used by the Navy,  was leased as the club house, a shed in the garden became a sail locker, club members built a launching ramp into the sea and a sailing club was born.

A Name for the New Club

The new club attracted many new members from the country's rapidly expanding catamaran fleet, and so it became 'The Catamaran Yacht Club'.

Classes sailing there at the time included Shearwaters, Swifts, Jumpaheads, Yachting Worlds, Cheetahs and Tais as well as Scorpions, Enterprises, Jolly Boats and Wayfarers.

The Catamaran Week

Through the 60's and 70's Sheppey was famous for its Catamaran week. This was one of the biggest cat racing event on the calendar, attracting competitors from all over the UK and Europe.

In the early days the event was sponsored by WD & HO Willis, a tobacco company-how times have changed!

The New Clubhouse

The Catamaran week became very popular and as the club grew we found ourselves in need of better accommodation. We brought a local holiday camp site with chalets, not too far from the boat park, which had originally been a Naval Gunnery School.

The site was ideal since it had buildings for showers, kitchen, dinning hall and a bar, there was plenty of room for camping and there was a large dike of water nearby on which children could learn to sail. 

When the new sea wall was built in front of the clubhouse to cope with higher tides from the Thames Barrier, a taller race office had to be erected. It was described at the time as being " Fifty feet from the beach, which gives a really first class view of our sailing waters for race control, besides a fair sized veranda for the wives of the club helmsmen, to watch their men sailing or capsizing."

Cats Always A Speciality

Although there is also dinghy sailing at Sheppey, its best known for cat sailing. When Tornado's became an Olympic class Sheppey had the biggest fleet in the country also the IYRU chose Sheppey for the trials to decide the 'A' class and 'B' class designs.

Sheppey Today

Today Sheppey is still going strong. We are a financially sound club (an achievement not to be sneered at these days!), with a strong management team determined to keep Sheppey at the centre of cat sailing in the 90's and beyond.

We race regularly, on Sundays and selected Saturdays though out the season from Easter to October. Start times vary according to the state of tide but with four hours sailing either side of high tide, weekends with no racing are very rare.

Our normal format is 3 to 4 races per day, with a break somewhere in the middle for lunch.