Cowes Week is built around the old English tradition of a village carnival week, and competitors consistently reply to event surveys confirming their preference for the week-long event. That raises other challenges and in 2022 the organisers will be launching a Cowes Week Race Camp accommodation option, which will be cost-effective Glamping (glamorous camping for those unaware of the lingo!) The camp site, about 1.5 miles from the Medina River will be serviced with a shuttle bus 18 hours a day and will help offset the challenge of finding somewhere in the small town of Cowes to stay. Although entry fees remain tightly controlled by the event organisers some of the other costs of participating do fluctuate and the event organisers are working with other local stakeholders to manage that situation more proactively. One of the other main objectives is to maintain international participation. For racers of a certain age the Admiral’s Cup was of course the ultimate international big boat event, one that drew people to Cowes Week every two years. Unfortunately, the Admiral’s Cup fell victim to a range of different pressures but in 2019 there were still sailors from over 100 yacht clubs, from 19 different countries competing at Cowes Week. The Solent Team Trophy, introduced a few years ago, is competed for by yacht clubs rather than nations, with the Royal London Yacht Cub winning the 2021 trophy ahead of a very strong Royal Yacht Squadron team. The regatta team would like to make this a more international trophy in the future and have expressed their willingness to assist with charter boats for overseas teams who want to compete. In addition to the hugely more powerful course-setting technology that is now in place, Cowes Week runs one of the most advanced competitor communication systems in the sport. The Cowes Week App is fully integrated with the course- setting software enabling the race team to send messages to individual boats, to specific fleets or to groups of boats. The good old days of trying to read the course board at the five- minute gun are long gone. Once the race committee sets the course it is all integrated to arrive on the app, which can be downloaded by all of the crew not just the tactical brains at the back. The foredeck crew no longer need to be shouting backwards asking where the first mark is. Although the race organisation still provides a printed graphic race chart, the Cowes Week App provides the distance and bearing to each of the marks in turn,
Top & above: Cowes Week has uniquely broad appeal with entrants ranging from racing yachts like Redshift to Bembridge Redwing one designs which have raced here for more than 100 years. The event draws about 600 boats in more than 30 classes and 5,000 sailors from about 20 countries
significantly reducing the drama factor for boats visiting the regatta for the first time.
Cowes Week also produces some of the most comprehensive TV coverage of sailing in the world. Three hours of live commentary covering most of the starts goes out seven days a week, a great resource for the event’s sponsors. In 2022 Cowes Week will launch its 5G project with the aim of having live 360° coverage coming back from 50 boats out on the racecourse. For all of the technology, Cowes Week is however still a challenging regatta. Starts off the Royal Yacht Squadron are legendary, beating up the Island shore against the tide remains a unique aspect of the regatta, one that continues to excite sailors every year. ‘We had a skipper come in and tell us how much he was looking forward to the week’s sailing a couple of years ago and on day one I looked at the racecourse only to see that skipper hard aground having pushed it a little too much off the Squadron start line. My heart sank for him. However, when he got ashore he made a point of seeking me out and telling me how much he
loved the race and how being hard aground just off the Royal Yacht Squadron was all part of the fun,’ says race director Laurence Mead. The race committee does however recognise the different types of racing that sailors enjoy and there has been a noticeable effort to deliver on all of those different expectations across the fleets. If you race at Cowes Week today you can expect the regatta director to be completely open- minded when listening to the class associations’ input. Whilst we have all long preferred going downwind to upwind, specific window angles for different boat designs are now more particular than ever before. A Cape 31 (which had its own class in CW 2021) with a huge asymmetric spinnaker needs broader downwind legs as the breeze builds, whereas some of the bigger IRC boats have gone down a road of developing very specialist close reaching sails and want the opportunity to fly them during the week. The 2021 regatta featured a long reach back from Lymington for the Class Zero and Class 1 boats when they got the opportunity to run with triple head jib setups. Whilst it’s not easy to get every leg right, setting them in the morning and being at the mercy of the windshifts thereafter, the course setters are now working to a much higher level of sophistication than ever before. For those sailors who haven’t done Cowes Week for a few years, the improved communications from the race team, as well as their adaptability to changing conditions will be a revelation.
Cowes Week 2022 starts on Saturday, July 30 with race day one and the opening party that evening, the final prizegiving is Friday, August 5. Entries can be made at
www.cowesweek.co.uk.
q SEAHORSE 73
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