Management Committee: COGS Rating Changes For 2026 – Updated Information

Firstly, COGS has always encouraged two-handed racing but we’re now welcoming single-handers into a renamed “short-handed” class. This will help when crew are unavailable and for those who simply prefer to sail alone. Insurances may restrict cover to a maximum of 18 hours of single-handed sailing so, if you’re entering our longer races single handed, check your policy. It is important for the insurance declaration on the COGS entry form.

Secondly, COGS entry fees are unchanged from 2025, but we’ve introduced a discount to encourage younger skippers. We’d love to welcome younger sailors into COGS, so please spread the word whenever you have the opportunity.

The biggest change is a move away from YTC handicapping. For 2026, all boats will compete with an IRC rating. All our races require only an IRC Standard Certificate which is obtained using straightforward data from your boat specification and sailmaker. You don’t need an Endorsed Certificate so there’s no need for professional measuring or weighing your boat. We’ve plenty of racers who’d be very happy to advise you.

This change has been subject to endless discussion and debate but we have to distinguish between what might suit an individual and what’s in the long term interest of COGS. Dissatisfaction with YTC had been building throughout 2025 with skippers quick to highlight perceived handicapping anomalies, but which is the fairer system – YTC or IRC?

YTC is a simple, fixed formula developed at Mylor YC in 2010 to handicap their then club boats – typically series production cruisers. Fifteen years on and the YTC website still describes it as “An initiative to promote club level participation in racing by cruising yachts and cruiser/racers”. YTC was never intended for competitive racing.

YTC is ideal for enabling cruising boats to join in fun-level racing where it’s all about encouraging participation. Many of us will have started in this way. Where it falls down for COGS is that our fleet comes mostly from clubs that have developed racing to a highly competitive level, leading to serious race boats opting into our YTC class, but it simply wasn’t designed to handle them. YTC was never intended for race boats.

By comparison, IRC is a complex, constantly evolving rule designed specifically for competitive racing. We know that COGS skippers want fair competition and IRC is undoubtedly the more appropriate system for our mixed fleet.

Both YTC and IRC are administered by RORC who publish “Guidance for the YTC to IRC Yacht Rating System Pathway” which is on our website. This guide specifies that YTC is intended for novice and average sailors, not competitive sailors. By the very nature of COGS races, our sailors are neither novice or average. They nearly all race regularly with their clubs and are most definitely competitive. The Guide also states that YTC is for club racing, and not for championship or international events. That might sound grand, but COGS is bound by a Constitution that requires us to provide racing to the standard “expected at national and international level”.

It also spells out the differences between the YTC and IRC formulae and you’ll see that YTC uses just five boat measurements against IRC’s more than twenty. YTC ignores such details as the boat’s keel, rudder, internal fit-out, rig dimensions and materials, spinnaker pole or bowsprit and number of sails carried, and it doesn’t follow what RORC terms state-of-the-art development – in other words, although it’s now 15 years old, it doesn’t recognise or respond to the evolving world of sailboat racing. To use anything other than IRC for our mixed, competitive fleet is to go against the advice of RORC – the UK’s technical authority for the promotion of fair racing.

Our skippers also want closer on-the-water racing. No one minds if the best sailors keep winning, but if the margins are consistently too big then something’s wrong. For enjoyable racing, we need boats to be physically close with the opportunity for slick crew work and smart tactics to make an immediate, visible difference.

Quite obviously, close racing comes from grouping boats of similar performance and yet, in our IRC class for 2025, our fastest boat gave over an hour of time correction to the slowest over a typical race. That’s too much. COGS races are always several hours long and, after even the most exciting start, boats quickly spread out and the enjoyment drops.

By bringing the previous YTC boats into IRC, the number of boats will enable us to split the fleet into two IRC classes, each with a narrower rating band giving both groups the closer racing they’ve asked for. The previous YTC boats will still mostly race with one another, but with the benefit of more accurate handicapping and fairer results.

We’ve used YTC for many years but times change and our Constitution requires us to use competitor feedback “to evolve and develop”. Many YTC boats dropped out from 2023 to 2024, and active participation fell in 2025 with only 50% of entrants doing more than one of the six races of the Coastal Series. It’s also disappointing that only six out of eighteen entrants contested the series and we have to learn from this and evolve if we’re to thrive.