Squibs at Cowes Week
What a lovely club Royal Victoria is! Sitting on the balcony in the sunshine at the end of Cowes Week, enjoying a pint and a snack, looking out over Wootton Creek as the tide ran out and the evening drew on, one could be forgiven for thinking all was well with the world. The Royal Vic people are special too. So very friendly, so very supportive and amazingly hospitable, they not only launched the Squibs for Cowes Week but ran a rib service – one that searched for becalmed Squibs and brought them home at the end.
For Cowes Week itself, the substantial rise in costs, particularly entrance and mooring fees, had sadly reduced the number of participants. For a visitor, attending Cowes Week has now become an expensive proposition. The atmosphere in the town was subdued as a result.
For the Squib Fleet, this meant a reduction in entries from the 2008 record of 40 boats to no more than 18 in 2009. The economic woes (or better put ‘collective banking idiocies’) have affected the Isle of Wight disproportionally and the local fleet had spent its money attending the National Championships at Weymouth where 108 Squibs participated.
However, the Squibs set out with determination to compete in what was, in everyone’s opinion, the most open regatta ever. Indeed four boats won races, Buccaneer 20 (2), Polyphagus 706 (1), Aquabat 13 (3) Scarab 2 619 (1) and to their utter amazement and delight Halcyon 737 (1).
For a while, it looked as if Aquabat 13 would walk away with the week. Since the boat was being helmed by 13 year old Freddie Warren-Smith, this looked ominous for the fleet in the future, the only hope being the chance that young Freddie would discover girls.
In the end, Buccaneer 20, owned and entered by Bob Cheek, showed the greater consistency - which was odd in that its crew was different virtually every day. It was helmed and crewed (two at a time!) by many leading members of the Royal Vic who went off mob-handed to receive the award at the official Cowes Week prize-giving. Polyphagus 706, helmed by guest Dillan Porter from the Royal Sydney YC, was second, again just a little surprising in that the last time the boat saw the water was Cowes Week 2008. In third place, Osprey 808, Chris Gear and Alex Porteous, did not win a race but with discards of 8th and 10th was otherwise always in the top five.
The week may be remembered for the ‘ballad of laid mark g’, the mark having been moved some 1.25 miles to the west in the update to the sailing instructions, this fact escaping the notice of about half the fleet. It will also be remembered for some of the most exciting racing at the start of the week and for some of the most tedious at the end. If the computers are now to be used to set the courses, perhaps a nautical nerd could be retained to programme in some windward work. Beats are after all a central component of sailing races.
Full results can be found on the Cowes Website