‘You have no right! No right!’ Goose 38 squawked at us – her crew as noisy as her name suggested, red protest flag stuffed in hand – furious we might steal her wind as our racing boat crept towards the shore to dodge a bad tide. ‘What are you talking about? Nonsense!’ our helmsman shouted back, deciding to take the risk – rocks and sandbanks lurking below be damned.
We were among 642 boats battling it out at Cowes Week, the world’s oldest sailing regatta, which is marking its 200th year. Our racing boats were Redwings, the longest-established of all the Cowes classes, whose tall red sails add a striking dash of colour to the Solent scene. Onboard Red Gauntlet II, dodging the Isle of Wight car ferry as we headed for the start line, I asked what happened to her predecessor. ‘100 yards away, down there,’ said the helmsman Joe Robertson, 42, who happens to be the Conservative MP for Isle of Wight East (Cowes is in the West, so no home advantage), pointing overboard. Red Gauntlet I had sunk, overwhelmed with water, never to be recovered. Thankfully we weren’t so unlucky.
As my contributions to sailing were few, other than reading the course and compass, I thought to get involved in the tense squabble with Goose, chirping: ‘Who’s the prick on 38?’ Fred Woolgar, 24, my fellow crew member, replied: ‘That is my uncle!’ Argh. Cowes Week turned out to be quite the family affair – Fred’s father was also racing that day, on 21, a boat imaginatively called Redwing, and about to take over running the Royal Yacht Squadron (RYS), one of the most exclusive sailing clubs in the world. A quick lesson in just how incestuous the yachtie circle can be. But the group did have a number of newbies this year, including myself.
The real spectacle at Cowes is as much in the racers as the racing. It brings out what one sailor called people’s ‘boat personalities,’ alter egos that surface the moment they step onto the water: ruthless out there, buying the next round back on land. (Thanks again for getting the Pimms’, Goose 38.)
Before the first race, a flock of Redwing sailors sat glumly at the Royal Ocean Racing Club (we hung out there over the extra exclusive RYS or the Island Sailing Club, which now caters more to dancing than relaxing sailors – Vernon Kay was on the decks at another venue one evening), certain we wouldn’t get out for lack of wind.
One person dismissed all our worries. Thomas Scott, the 80-something Fastnet veteran and helmsman of Ibis – a startling purple boat known as the ‘nail varnish’ that has competed at Cowes since 1937 – trusted his sixth sense and declared: ‘It will happen.’ A few guffawed. He was right. We were on the water a couple of hours behind schedule.
Much of the jostling happens at the start; you can’t line boats up like horses in a gate. At Cowes, the start line is eyeballed, and comes from lining up two strips of lights, one on the castle and the other on the flagpole of the RYS. Boats pass this imaginary line when a timer reaches zero and the cannon goes off. It’s a battle for clean air – boats manoeuvre dangerously for position so they’re at full speed exactly when the countdown ends, and an immense body of sails hurtles over the line.
The rivalry is nothing new. A battle between uncle and nephew at Cowes led to the first world war – a slight exaggeration, but King Edward VII so enjoyed rubbishing Kaiser Wilhelm II’s racing yachts here that it set off a spree of maritime one-upmanship: British boats and crews were simply better, the King would crow after beating his nephew off the Isle of Wight; Wilhelm would respond by commissioning ever bigger, faster, flashier boats. The Kaiser’s magnificent Ensign, won in battle, is still proudly displayed in the RYS.
Sailing at Cowes really was once the competition of kings. George V began the tradition of presenting the King’s Cup; Queen Victoria built Osborne House in East Cowes – hence the old quip that she never rode a horse because she preferred Cowes. Even the Tsar came.
Most recently it was Prince Philip, Admiral of the Squadron for decades, who raced his Dragon-class Bluebottle with a competitiveness his descendants haven’t quite inherited. One competitor remembers telling him to ‘fuck off’ after he barged onto the starboard end of the start line. Philip’s reply: ‘My wife owns the water!’ After years laid up ashore, Bluebottle was restored by the local Cowes boatbuilder David Heritage and is back on the water, competing in the regatta. Princess Anne, the current Admiral, was there for the first three days of this bicentenary regatta proving his modernising instinct right: meeting cadets at the Youth Sailing Zone, firing the starting cannon with a crash that makes spectators jump out of their skins, hosting drinks aboard the Trinity House vessel Patricia, moored in the middle of the race course.
The blend of people at Cowes Week was obvious in the ferry queue: Henri-Lloyd jackets and Musto bags alongside those there purely for the atmosphere. The more tanned and leathery, the more obviously a sailor. Look hard enough out to sea and you could find five-times Olympic gold medallist Sir Ben Ainslie out on a cutting-edge boat, sometimes with youth-programme sailors alongside him. Or there was Malcolm Offord, the former Tory minister turned Scottish Reform leader, who arrived this time in the sizable TP52, Braveheart. Its spinnaker tore clean in half mid-race. ‘Not ideal,’ he said. Elsewhere was Gladiator, a 50ft ‘formula one’ super-series racer with a crew of 14, owned by the British billionaire Tony Langley, who joked of the bicentenary: ‘200 years, or as we say, just the other day.’
You finish, strip off your ‘oilies’ in the middle of the parade, and sink a few drinks with the people you were just shouting at
It’s part of why Cowes has such a hold on people: the unpredictable Solent sets a puzzle each day for billionaires and family sailors, alike. Unlike the America’s Cup – sorry, the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup – Cowes still sees family crews in a decades-old boat racing in the same waters, at the same time as the professionals. Sometimes it is the families showing the pros how it’s really done.
We came fourth in one race after leading for a period and seventh in another, following our fracas with Goose. They didn’t lodge a protest in the end: the process drags into the evening, and everyone would rather have a pint than sit in the appeals office, where I found one glum man waiting for his case to be heard. This is the rhythm of racing: you finish, strip off your ‘oilies’ in the middle of the parade, and sink a few drinks with the people you were just shouting at.
Time is better spent wandering around the harbour, working out which boat names are good, which are terrible, and what you’d call your own. The worst on offer this year were Banter, BLT, Swift Half, Fit Chick, and Insert Coin, complete with a bitcoin logo. Better were Tumblehome, Calypso, Waxwing, and Tally Ho. The Redwings tend to go for birds – the Tory-MP-owned, socialist-sounding Red Gauntlet excepted. Mine, if I ever earn a boat of my own, would be a flower. A sweetpea, perhaps.
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