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What's Happening at Port Credit Yacht Club
Stay up to date with the latest club news, updates, and insights. Explore articles covering yacht club operations, member experiences, event highlights, and best practices for creating a seamless and engaging club community.
Ninety Years of Yachting Excellence
This year, Port Credit Yacht Club is marking its 90th anniversary, and on the morning of June 6 that milestone felt real for the first time. Folding chairs lined the clubhouse lawn in neat rows, the flagpole carried a navy burgee stitched with a gold ‘90’ above the Canadian flag, and a fleet of sailboats waited past the breakwater for their turn to parade the harbour. This was Sailpast, the tradition that opens our season every single year, and this year it carried the weight of nine decades behind it. Read More
The Founding Story of Port Credit Yacht Club
Port Credit Yacht Club exists because of a storm. In 1934, a small lifeboat broke loose from a passing freighter out on Lake Ontario and washed ashore at the east end of Port Credit's Cumberland Drive. A young man named Ted Schofield found her sitting in the sand, rigged her with a mast, a centerboard, a rudder, and a sail, and gave her a name: Arrowhead. That homemade 16-foot dinghy is the reason any of this exists. Read More
Learn to Sail at Port Credit Yacht Club
This July, the harbour at Port Credit Yacht Club was louder than usual, in the best way. More than 1,000 youth sailors, ages 8 to 22, were on site for the Steerers' Invitational, the Four Sisters Open, and the Club 420 North American Championship, and roughly 300 dinghies launched and returned from our docks every single day. Anyone who drove by that week saw exactly what a Learn to Sail program can grow into. Read More
The Bell Clapper Race, A Port Credit Yacht Club Tradition
You can blame it all on Happy Hour. Friday nights at Port Credit Yacht Club used to mean half-price drinks and the whole membership packed into the bar to celebrate the end of the work week. Around 10 o'clock most Fridays in the early 1970s, someone would notice that one particular couple had slipped out. "They've just gone down to the Dufferin Mark to check the clappers," people would say. In truth, they had simply had enough of the noise and smoke, and had taken their sailboat out onto the quiet lake toward the sparkling skyline of Toronto. Read More
BoatHub at Port Credit Yacht Club, A Crew of Their Own
The picnic table under the Club pavilion is still warm from the day when eight women lift their cups for one last toast of the season. They have spent the summer trading off the helm of the same J/24, a boat that belongs to Port Credit Yacht Club rather than to any one of them, booked through BoatHub and shared across a rotating crew who show up ready to sail. Some nights the wind barely moves the fleet at all. Some nights it is enough to send them home laughing and soaked. Either way, they are back the next Thursday. Read More
Port Credit Yacht Club's Harbour Crew Goes Electric
The mornings sound different at Port Credit Yacht Club this season. Where a diesel lift once rattled the yard awake, boats now rise off the water in near silence, carried by a 40-ton electric lift that the Harbour Crew learned to run before most members even noticed the change. It is a small shift in sound with a big story behind it, and it starts with the team that has been hauling boats out of this harbour, one way or another, for ninety years. Read More
New Member Orientation at Port Credit Yacht Club
The blue gift bags go first, one to a name tag, set out on a table under the stone fireplace where the Club's burgee hangs above the front hall. By the time the group photo happens an hour later, most of the strangers in that room are trading phone numbers. Port Credit Yacht Club runs a New Member Orientation each season, and it is usually the first place a new member's PCYC story starts. Read More
Port Credit Yacht Club at the Toronto International Boat Show
Every January, long before the docks thaw out, a scale model of Port Credit Yacht Club's marina shows up in a convention hall downtown, model boats lined up in miniature slips on a strip of green turf. It belongs to the Club's booth at the Toronto International Boat Show, North America's largest indoor boat show, and for a good number of current members, it is the exact spot where their PCYC story began, standing in front of that little green harbour asking a stranger in a PCYC polo what it's really like to join, months before they ever set foot on the real thing. Read More
The Pool, the Patio, and the Chartroom at Port Credit Yacht Club
Ask a member what they did at the Club last Saturday, and the answer is often something other than sailing. Just as often it is the pool at sunset, a plate from the carving station in the Harbour View Dining Room, or an evening on the patio while the kids run the playground until the light goes. Port Credit Yacht Club's 90 years were built on the water, but a good part of an ordinary member's week happens just a few steps back from the docks. Read More
Racing at Port Credit Yacht Club: A Season on Lake Ontario
Port Credit Yacht Club racing fills the calendar from the season's first gun to its last, a mix of weeknight club races, distance classics, and junior regattas that has been building for most of the Club's 90 years. Some of these events are older than the clubhouse additions built around them, passed from one race committee to the next long enough to become as much a part of PCYC's identity as the harbour itself. Read More
A Landmark Week on the Water: PCYC Hosts Three Major Youth Regattas
For eight straight days this July, Port Credit Yacht Club's harbour barely slowed down. Between July 16 and 26, PCYC hosted more than 1,000 youth sailors, ages 8 to 22, from across Canada and the United States, across three major regattas run back to back on Lake Ontario. It ranks among the largest annual gatherings of youth competitive sailing in the country, and it put a spotlight on sailors who may well be on a path toward Pan American and Olympic competition. Read More