%20Arrow%2C%20Lone%20Star%2C%20and%20Myrtle%20all%20competing%20in%20the%20XOD%20class%20in%20the%20200th%20Cowes%20Week-900x427.png)
Two hundred years after seven yachts lined up off Cowes on the Isle of Wight, England, to race for a £100 Gold Cup, North Sails Cowes Week closed its bicentenary edition on the Solent on Friday 7 August, with fireworks lighting the sky for the first time in six years.
More than 640 boats, 642 by the week's final tally, raced across 36 classes, split between the smaller dayboats and keelboats of the White Group and the larger, cabined cruiser-racers of the Black Group. More than 5,000 sailors took part, and 153 trophies were handed out across the week.
The regatta's history runs back to that first race in 1826, when seven yachts competed under the flag of the Royal Yacht Club. King George IV presented the King's Cup the following year, and the Crown has stayed close to Cowes ever since. The Princess Royal fired the Royal Yacht Squadron's cannon to open this year's racing, the same cannon that has sent fleets away for generations, after a 21-gun salute from the Squadron platform. It carried personal weight for her: as a girl she watched her father, Prince Philip, race from the deck of the royal yacht Britannia, and in 2014 she helmed UKSA's Farr 65 Albatross II across the finish line ahead of her husband's boat.
On the water, no result stood taller than Lone Star's in the XOD fleet, an X One Design 21-foot classic wooden keelboat class designed in 1909 by Alfred Westmacott. Phil Lawrence, David King and Nick Froud sailed six straight bullets in a competitive 60-boat class, locking up the Captains' Cup with a full day to spare. "We were just blisteringly fast all week," Lawrence said. Lone Star carried that form into the White Group standings as well, leading the wider division heading into the final day.
The Black Group came down to the wire. Ben Rogers' Contessa 32 Solan Goose and Sam Laidlaw's Quarter Tonner BLT went into the last race of the week level on points, with the group title decided on that result alone. Solan Goose took it. BLT still walked away with the Quarter Ton class win, a repeat of last year, but the bigger Black Group prize changed hands.
A new trophy marked the milestone. The Bicentenary Gold Cup, introduced by Cowes Combined Clubs and scored only on the first three days so the entire 641-boat fleet was eligible, went to Andy Maskell's Contessa 33 High Spirit in Performance Cruiser D.
At the top end of the fleet, Karl Kwok's Hong Kong-flagged TP52 Beau Geste picked up the week's biggest silverware: the Britannia Cup, first presented by King George VI in 1950, the New York Yacht Club Challenge Cup, and a run of IRC Zero wins that included six straight bullets.
Women's Day, held on the Tuesday, drew 102 women helms to the start line, part of a fleet where more than a third of all competitors were women this year. Hannah Mills OBE won the Women's Day Trophy for her work leading Athena Pathway, Britain's Women's and Youth America's Cup programme, and the day's other headline came off the water: former British Sailing Team kitefoiler Jemima Lines was announced as a new signing to the GB1 British America's Cup team.
The Folkboat class returned to Cowes Week racing for the first time in half a century, a traditional clinker design that doesn't plane but drew a crowd at every mark regardless.
%20Bellatrix%2C%20Cidron%20Too%2C%20Folkboat%2C%20Diamond%2C%20Daring%2C%20Gybe%20N'%2C%20Madelaine%2C%20The%20Otter-900x483.jpg)
BLT, which won both the Black Group and the overall Cowes Week trophy in 2025, held its Quarter Ton class again this year but lost the group to Solan Goose. Bluebottle, last year's White Group winner, didn't reclaim that trophy either, with Lone Star's XOD form carrying the White Group into the bicentenary year instead.
North Sails Cowes Week returns from 31 July to 6 August 2027.
