Folkboats, 153 trophies and a 200th edition that delivered for 5,000 sailors

Seven days, 43 classes, 153 trophies. The weather gods played ball right up until the final hooter.

Friday delivered a sea breeze early enough for every class to get decent racing in before the prizegiving, a gathering the Cowes Combined Clubs themselves describe as well-established and slightly chaotic. With 641 entrants across 43 classes, that chaos is earned.

The headline result belongs to Phil Lawrence, Nick Froud and David King. Sailing the XOD Lone Star, the Lymington trio won overall in a fleet of 60 boats, a class where consistency across a full week is brutally hard to find. Lawrence was direct about how they managed it: "We were just blisteringly fast all week." For Lawrence, who has raced at the front of numerous fleets across five decades, it is another line on a very long CV.

In the Black Group, things went to the wire. Ben Rogers' Contessa 32 Solan Goose and Sam Laidlaw's quarter tonner BLT finished the week tied on points, with the group decided on Friday's final race result alone. Solan Goose took it. There is a reason sailors keep coming back to this regatta.

A new trophy marked the occasion. The Bicentenary Gold Cup, created by the CCC to celebrate the regatta's 200th anniversary, went to Andy Maskell sailing Contessa 33 High Spirit in Club Cruiser D class. The cup counted only the first three days of racing, so all 641 entrants were eligible, including those whose class racing finished before the full seven days were up.

The young German crew aboard Stoertebeker, racing in IRC Class Zero, picked up two awards at the prizegiving: recognition as the top training boat for young sailors, and the Sustainability Award for the most carbon-free miles sailed. They had sailed from Kiel to get there. On Saturday morning they pointed the bow back north to do it again.

Christopher Bake took the Newcomers Trophy on his classic Anteren in IRC Class Five. The Solent Team Trophy had looked like Royal Yacht Squadron's for much of the week, but Cowes Corinthian Yacht Club claimed it by Friday night, taking it back to their base at the southern end of Cowes High Street.

Two new class stories stood out. The RS21, a lightweight asymmetric planing design, was won by Crispin Winser on White Oryx. The Folkboats returned to Cowes Week racing for the first time in 50 years, 25 boats in a traditional clinker design that definitely doesn't plane but delivers brilliant racing, the kind that draws a crowd on the committee boat. Cy Grisley and Simon Evans on Gybe N' took the class win.

Some smaller boats missed Wednesday's racing due to strong winds. It was a minor footnote on a major occasion. The 200th edition of Cowes Week delivered for the more than 5,000 sailors on the Solent, and the 2027 edition runs from Saturday 31 July to Friday 6 August.