From the Director's Chair

The Daily Sail got the take on this year's Skandia Cowes Week from Cowes Combined Clubs' Stuart Quarrie

Stuart Quarrie was fielding the abuse well - not from the excessive heat or the delayed starts or even the occasional course cock-ups, but because of the piratical black eye patch and the resultant references to parrots, hooks, peglegs, ticking clocks and crocodiles that the Director of Cowes Combined Clubs was weathering towards the end of Skandia Cowes Week.

The problem in fact was serious - following a cateract operation last autumn there was a problem with one of his retinas, possibly due to the stress of running Cowes Week and this was causing his vision to go. Fortunately Quarrie knew his surgeon who advised him to be operated on during Skandia Cowes Week or risk going blind in one eye. "So they cut into the eye and stuck probes in there," says Quarrie with a certain malevolent glee, adding that all this was done under local anaesthetic that enabled him to chat to the surgeon during the operation. "I try not to tell people unless they ask..." he added.

For Cowes Combined Clubs there was what looked like being a major problem when it became apparent that their new regatta centre would not be finished in time for Skandia Cowes Week. As a result they operated from a temporary regatta centre in a marquee on The Parade. "That has worked incredibly well," says Quarrie, "but having the results team, with Andy Rainer and so on separate from the regatta centre has had its pluses and minuses - mainly minuses - from a logistics point of view. We’ll be glad to be back in the proper place next year."

The first flats in the new regatta centre are to be finished by the end of October while the complete building will be ready at the end of February 2004. "We should be able to move in in March and get everything really properly set up and next year should be a doddle."

The major hassles aside from this were the endless light winds. "We were lucky being able to get racing in every day and most people got proper races, some long delays, but that’s the way of life." Quarrie admits that the courses on Sunday could have been better. "The wind died against the forecast that we’d had and therefore we had a lot of courses that ended up being too long and not being able to shortened all the courses because we hadn't anticipated the wind would die like that. Boats just couldn't get to the next mark and that was major hassle."

Because of the light conditions there were precious few incidents. "We have had no sinkings - normally there's at least a couple," says Quarrie. "We've had a couple of boats try to go across the bows of container ships, even with the patrol boats saying ‘excuse me you shouldn’t do that’. But they have been very gentlemanly about it and retired. Fortunately we have a good working relationship with ABP and unless someone has been blatantly dangerous, they give us a report on what the incident has been and allow us to deal with it if it is one of our competitors. But they retain the power to prosecute if they want to."

As ever there is the increasing trend for boats to only take part for a few days. "That’s always been there," says Quarrie. "One reason 3-4 years ago we introduced the whole regatta fee was to encourage people to do the whole regatta. It is particularly true in a Fastnet year, almost none of the boats sailing in the Fastnet will do the final Saturday and a lot won’t do the final Friday because they want time off for their crew. And then there's boats like Alfa Romeo which are in south coast UK to do the Fastnet and they are quite happy to do a couple of days round the cans racing, but they wouldn’t want to do the whole week."

One of the compromises of this year's event was over how the IRM fleet should be incorporated in the Skandia Cowes Week.

"IRM is very difficult, because it is a relatively small group of boats and the IRM fleet spread is from 52 footers down to boats like Alice, a Mumm 36, and there aren’t enough boats racing in this Skandia Cowes Week in the bottom rating band to warrant having a separate small boat IRM fleet," explains Quarrie.

They spoke to the IRM Class Association over last winter and the class were keen that Cowes Combined Club force IRM-type boats to race in an IRM division as they did successfully at Cork Week last year.

"Our attitude was Cowes Week isn’t about forcing anyone to do anything – not quite true, but pretty much," explains Quarrie. "If you have got a boat which has both an IRM and IRC certificate we believe they should choose who they sail against.

"So once we got away from that, the IRM class didn’t want us to do the dual scoring, which is what we did last year pretty successfully, because then you get some IRM boats that are optimised for IRC with crew numbers, etc and other boats that are optimised for IRM with limited crew weight but with five spinnakers and you get the whole fleet splitting – so they didn't want us to do that."

However a lot of the IRM boats wanted to be able to race for some of the prestigious trophies within Skandia Cowes Week. "Judging on last year’s IRM fleet numbers there was no way that the clubs that owned the trophies would have given them to half a dozen IRM boats, when there was a fleet of 20-30 big IRC boats," continues Quarrie. "So the compromise was reached that we had three days IRM racing at the beginning of the week and those boat then played IRC for the rest of the week and could go for some of the prestige trophies. And we found a mathematic way of allowing those boats to race for the overall black group trophy."

In the end course the IRM fleet, the cream of British yacht racing, proved larger than CCC anticipated. "In fact it would have been an ideal fleet to allocate the major trophies to," says Quarrie. "So if next February if we can get commitment from 20 big IRM boat owners that they are definitely going to enter, then that’s probably what we’ll do."

However Quarrie says that he is still keen on not going down the mandatory route of Cork Week. While this was seen as a success at Cork it was not so well received by the more marginal boats maintains Quarrie. "Talk to the Mumm 30 that did Cork and was forced to do it because she was that type of boat - they had an awful regatta, as did some of the other boats that were on the fringes of the IRM sort of boat. The core fleet thought it was great but the core fleet was IRM anyway – so why make them go there?"

There is also an additional problem - "say we do get a good big boat IRM fleet and then we get someone like Neville Crichton wanting to bring Alfa Romeo here do we then say 'if you want to go for the major trophies you have to go IRM?' And then the IRM boys will be unhappy, because they have a 93 footer playing with them for the days they want to play. Or do we say to the Neville Crichtons of the world “you might have the biggest, most beautiful, expensive, high tech boats in the world, but all these 40-50s are going for major trophies and we’ll give you another bit of glass at the end of the day… so it is a real problem whichever way we go..."

An innovation this year was the committee boat line starts for the XODs. This has proved a great success. The XOD class requested that they could start from a committee boat line when there was big tide and little breeze on the Squadron line or when you couldn't beat to the first mark from the Squadron line. "With 70 boats all going the same sort of speed, unless you have a beat – if they all drift down with the tide to a mark they’ll all arrive there together," says Quarrie.

Obviously as this has worked for the XODs then other classes might be keen to go down the same route. "It could be very difficult to manage," says Quarrie. "It would be quite easy to say 'the Etchells have a committee boat start on Tuesday', so everyone knows that but then on the Tuesday for some reason it is a perfect day for a Squadron line start and so why have you taken them away from the spectators?

"What we have done with the XODs is said that the class captain can come up each morning and talk to the PRO about the particular conditions for that day and on a day-by-day have flexibility. For one class that is fine - for all classes, that would be a logistical nightmare. So what we have said at the moment is that any class that get above 70 entries, can ask for the same flexibility – slightly tongue in cheek…"

Moving beyond Cowes Week, although something which will have a bearing on it in years to come, Quarrie is also on the new RORC, ORC and US Sailing sponsored committee looking at the possibility of a new international grand prix rule.

At present he says he must still keep quiet about this. "We’re getting there - the basic principle is sorted out, but there's still a lot more work still to do. The next meeting is in September in London.

"If you talk to the design community, as we do, virtually every designer has a different slant on what rule he thinks is the perfect rule. Which helps not at all. People want this type of box rule, or one with any number of appendages that can do anything, or a single moving appendage, another wants an IMS-type rule, another wants a IRM VPP derived rule - there are as many options out there as there are people. So what we're trying to do is to put together a set of principles: we're not going to make everyone happy, but that satisfy a large enough proportion of potential owners that the whole thing works."