ANOTHER SUCCESSFUL YEAR AT COWES WEEK

North Powers Boats from One Design to TP52s

With everything from Etchells and J/70s to Fast 40s and TP52s, Lendy Cowes Week is an entirely inclusive sailing week with thousands of competitors taking part in one of the world’s largest sailing events in this iconic destination. What started off to be a very light air week with racing relying on seabreezes rather than gradient winds, turned very quickly on the final day of racing with extreme conditions and racing called off just an hour into the final race after eye opening conditions on the water.

An outstanding performance was put in by the new J/112 Leon whose previous owners were winners of the IRC Worlds and Europeans. Now owned by David Franks, Leon and team put in a stellar performance, winning the majority of the races in Class 4. Franks brought his experience from his JPK 10.80 Straight Dealer to the race course to take the win in the class and hold off fellow J/112 sailors Davanti Tyres skippered by Paul Heys and Chaz Ilvill.

With six different IRC fleets the racing was close amongst all the yachts. Adam Gosling’s new JPK 11.80 YES! pulled back from a 2-6 over the weekend to win IRC 2 overall. In second and third places respectively were Christopher Daniel’s Juno and Tony Mack’s Mcfly who were tied on equal points and trailing shortly behind YES! by just 3 points.

IRC0 was dominated by Tony Langley’s TP52 Gladiator all week, who won four out of six races. The competition between second and third was much closer between Lady Mariposa and Tokoloshe. Unfortunately with the last race being abandoned, Michael Bartholomew’s Tokoloshe had too much to come back from and ended up just one point behind Lady Mariposa.

The main event for the Fast 40+ was the first four days of the regatta, where they had a mixture of short windward/leeward and coastal races. Despite some hot competition from Peter Morton’s Girls on Film, Nicklas Zenstrom’s, RAN once again stormed the results giving them a three-point lead and the overall win.

The J/70 fleet had their highest turnout for a regatta this year in the UK with many charter boats revelling in the success of the One Design class. With 41 boats on the start line, it was experience in the fleet that proved to be the key to success. After a slow start to the week, Paul Ward’s Eat,Sleep,J,Repeat recovered to take the overall win thanks to a string of bullets in the coastal races.

The XOD fleet was one the strongest One Design classes on the water, with a total of forty-nine boats coming from Itchenor, Lymington, Cowes and Hamble. Andrew Tremlett’s Lass had a fantastic week, winning four races and the overall win for the second year in a row.

As well as the above mentioned, there were many more strong performances across all the fleets by North Sails clients, congratulations to all those competing.

Results