Cowes Week 2026 - The End Report

If you look at the results, Cowes Week 2026 was a bit of a flop for Aquila and her crew.  However, you have to be in it to win it and whilst we did not win, we showed that a 50 year old boat can make it to the start line and make much younger fully crewed boats look over their shoulder to see where the GK29 was.

The boat had far to much weight on it in terms of spare parts, tools, anchors and chain, far to ,much kit for the crew (we were sleeping onboard) and lots more.  Remove this and you may make a small gain.  The issues with the mast not being straight up down because of the rigging definitely caused us grief and affected our pointing upwind as did the weed on the propeller that stopped it from closing into its racing form. We need to tweek some parts of the rigging and running rigging to make it more efficient, but hey, we are talking small gains all round if any.

On the plus side, we got better at crewing as the week went on and our hoisting and dropping of the spinnaker became a thing of beauty by the end.  We had not sailed together before as a crew and Aquila had not been sailed that hard for many years, so issues were going to come out of the woodwork.  We cleared the weed mentioned above and became a lot more comfortable sailing the boat.

One time through the week, a gentleman came along, spoke to us whilst beaming from ear to ear.  He used to sail on the Aquila 25 years ago in Wales.  He could not believe to see the boat still going and also that the decor of the vessel had not changed one bit.  That was a special moment for me.

A note will be sent to the race committee about the races and how they favour, without any shadow of doubt, the faster boats but it will also be sent with a congratulatory note on how good and well organised the week was.

Success or failure..............?  Hard to say.  We enjoyed ourselves, the evolution of Aquila from an project boat when purchased to competitive family cruiser racer continues.