From the archives

‘Splendours of Cowes Week’ by John Scott Hughes, from The Field, 30 July 1953

Cowes Week opens on Saturday, the racing being under the flag of the Royal Southampton Yacht Club. This club was founded in 1875, and its association with the first regatta of the week is of such long standing that he must be a very old man who can remember it being otherwise. This is the same thing as saying that it is a long while since Cowes Week was contained in the space of a week. But in rather more recent time the ‘week’ has stretched into the next as well — I mean the inclusion of the Royal Corinthian’s fixture on the Monday succeeding Cowes Week, which falls this year on 10 August. Again, this is only another way of saying that folk come earlier and stay later, and that Cowes Week has expanded for them.

Now what is this but, as we say, a sign of the times? Socially at least, Cowes Week used to come to a most definite end on Friday night, after the fireworks. You looked out next morning and all the congested magnificence of the night before had departed. So naked was the scene that you could think that the Solent had been swept by a hurricane. It was no operation of Nature’s, however, but an old English custom — society and the steam yachts had melted away, bound for Scotland.

Such goings-on had their own kind of grandeur, but they are of the past — belonging to that era when an old Squadron member could grumble: “Cowes is no longer a place to sail; it has become a court” — and the young have no remembrance of them. Cowes is again a place to sail. The place to sail!

The ancient mariner who is writing this piece has seen much of this watery world and the yachts that sail thereon — it has been his highly peculiar task and happy lot in life to have been required to do so — and the old chap has always maintained with much earnestness that there is no more perfect stretch of sailing water than the Solent, and no yachting port with more manifold charms than Cowes, the hub of the Solent.

You might even say of the Solent that it is like St Paul, who could be all things to all men. Should you be fatigued by the flags and incessant gunfire and the crowds that throng a Cowes Week, you may slip over to the Beaulieu River or down to Newtown and find a seclusion as remote as say, Labrador. But I do not believe fatigue can be experienced so long as you remain afloat. For although you are apart from the thronging crowds, you have the flags and the incessant gunfire; but now they, the flags and guns, have a meaning. By golly, they have, too!

No boat that had me at the helm during any Cowes Week ever did better than to get a second. Thus I may be the more readily believed when I affirm that to get a winning gun at Cowes is one of the most delightful and thrilling things that can happen to a man. A signal achievement, you might well add, for is there anywhere such a majestic yet mellow roaring as is made by the Squadron battery?

Moreover, and for all its ever-varying beauty and manifold charms, the Solent in the vicinity of Cowes is a most testing stretch of water. This is due to the strength, complexity and general cussedness of the tides. At Cowes the tides are more important than the breezes; by which I meant that they have a stronger influence on strategy and tactics.

The famous phenomenon of the ‘double high water’ within the Solent is pretty generally known. The ebb runs for an hour or rather more, then stands, and even in places floods again. (This behaviour accounts for the rise of Southampton as a liner port.) Solent yachtsmen know, and all others quickly learn, that shortly before high water, while the east-going stream is still running, a west-going stream has begun to run hard along the shore from Cowes to Egypt Point. The length of this westgoing stream is perhaps half a mile and its width about 100 yards. It is within this strip of water that most yacht races at Cowes are won or lost.

Let us attempt to see why, from an example. On 10 August, the day of the Royal Corinthian’s regatta at Cowes, high water is at 1pm. At about 11.30am, the tidal stream set to the westward. Along the shore and all the length of Cowes Green, however, this west-going stream had begun about an hour earlier, 10am, say (the tides do not keep a strict timetable, though strict timetables for them have to be published). So then, yachts starting at 11am in a westerly breeze (the much-prevailing wind at Cowes) have a foul tide out in the Solent and a fair tide in that narrow strip off the Green.

Within a second or two from the start of the race you have the exciting spectacle of a lot of boats short-tacking in this lane of water, naturally at exceedingly close quarters. The strategy is simple enough: to edge your nearest rival out into the foul tide. The requisite tactics are not so simple.

As he tacks into the shore and the fair tide the skipper is on the starboard tack. But he himself will be on port so soon as the shoaling water compels him to come about — and he must give way. Well then, the reader will at once appreciate that the ideal way to manage matters as you come offshore is to lee-bow a starboard tack boat and to hail him for “Water!” as you both approach the beach. It follows, then, that your opponent, having to tack before you do, leaves you in a wider space of fair tide; in other words, he will sooner reach the edge of the fair tide and have to tack before you again. Every tack that a boat makes slows her down.

I fear this attempted description makes dull reading, when the actual, practical, living thing itself, so beautiful to watch, is about the most exciting thing in the world.

“NO YACHTING PORT HAS MORE MANIFOLD CHARMS THAN COWES, THE HUB OF THE SOLENT”