The Southern Yacht Club is located in New Orleans, Louisiana's West End neighborhood, on the shores of Lake Pontchartrain.

Additionally, the Southern Yacht Club has, for over fifty years, hosted Intercollegiate Sailing Association regattas including The New Orleans Sugar Bowl Regatta, often partnering with Tulane University as the yacht club is the home of the Tulane Green Wave sailing team.

Sailing Olympic medalists including Gilbert Gray who in 1932 won a Gold Medal in Los Angeles in the Star Class, G. Shelby Friedrichs Jr. won Gold in the Dragon Class in Mexico City, 1968 and most recently, John C. Lovell who received a Silver Medal in Athens in 2004[6][7] as well as numerous other national and international champions.

However, during the summer months, many New Orleanians retreated to the Gulf Coast to flee the heat, humidity and yellow fever.

The seventeen years of the American Civil War and Reconstruction greatly curtailed boating activities until 1878 when the club was reorganized and its first postwar regatta held.

Heavily damaged by wind and flood waters, the clubhouse was ultimately destroyed by a massive fire which burned, unchecked, in the hours following the storm.

Through more than one hundred and sixty years of prosperity, depressions, wars, yellow fever epidemics, flood and hurricanes, the Southern Yacht Club has maintained a Corinthian tradition of keen competition, sportsmanship and eponymous hospitality.