Teaching your partner to drive a car is still best left to others.Perhaps the libations over the coming week in Cowes, of which there will be many, should echo one of the old favourite toasts heard in Royal Navy wardrooms. I see a lot of people spending their weekend shopping, and they just do not know what they are missing."Not all will be sweetness and light Many womenwill be racing with their partners. Skipper rage is not unknown, and any relationship can suffer. "You get a great physical thrill out of the way a boat behaves. You can't beat the feeling of coming back after a windy race.

They want to be good at it, knowing they can develop exactly the same talents as men. Bailey no longer sees a gender barrier."I think a lot of people could benefit from taking up the game as it combines the physical, intellectual and social, and it is an eternal challenge," she says. Now, just as women partners are unremarkable in law firms, so she feels women sailors, in their own right and as members of mixed crews, are an everyday occurrence.She accepts that physical strength remains a barrier in some aspects but sees a steady increase in those who do not just want to be a decorative relief to the line-up of macho males. She is driving a three-person Dragon in the absence of her champion husband, Graham, and looking forward to being able to say: "I'm going to do it my way because he is not there."She remembers when she was one of very few women who raced offshore, and when the university men's team at Oxford were every-thing and the women more of a social appendage. After all, women, it is taken for granted, are there in their own right."We just want to get on with it," says Julia Bailey, who can hold her own at both national and international championship level when she is not being a partner in a London law firm.

And, as far as natural talent is concerned, I'd like to think it was equally there for both sexes."Estimates put female participation this year at about one third of the near-9,000 who will coax 1,029 yachts round intertwined race courses administered by a team heavily populated by women.To celebrate this liberalisation of what is often seen as an exclusive sport, the organisers have designated, not to everyone's delight, Thursday as Ladies' Day. A mixture of David Shilling hats atop painstakingly made-up faces, coupled with Henri Lloyd's Extreme Deck Boots on legs covered with bruises and scars, is unlikely to be seen out on the water.Some feel this is both a gimmick that tries to echo the Ascot-style social season - of which Cowes is no longer a part - and a bit out of date. Robertson cannot yet parade her new-born twins down the High Street until a gossip magazine has exclusively published some photographs, but she can see, just as at Olympic level, a multitude of women not just joining in but being fully accepted as part of the scene.MacArthur has always resolutely refused to be drawn into the gender divide and another solo sailor, Emma Richards, now married to the Volvo Race winner Mike Sanderson, is fair and square in the same camp "I have always hated being asked what are the differences I would say: 'I don't know because I am not a guy'. Elements of the gender war are still there, and some of the joshing will definitely not be PC, but at both high-profile level and round-the-cans racing, this is a riotous assembly competing on equal terms. After all, the trailblazing Ellen MacArthur prompted No 10 to jump on the bandwagon, handing out a timely damehood before she had even crossed the line at the end of her round-the-world record.MacArthur's co-patron in the charitable trust bearing her name is Shirley Robertson, the double Olympic gold medallist, the second won with Sarah Webb and Sarah Eyton in Athens. In the Goodwood Cup he will team up with his other favourite horse, the redoubtable Sergeant Cecil. He will have good rides, too, for Peter Chapple-Hyam."For all its trickiness, this is a fantastic meeting to be involved with, one of the big festivals," he said "I'm riding good horses for good trainers, good friends Yes, I see myself as lucky.". They come in all sorts of beautiful shapes and sizes, they help the heart beat faster, but, once out on the racetrack, girly they are not.