This is the season of the winter handicap events, which in their own strange way provide some of the best racing of the whole year. For the Grafham Grand Prix I reunited with my old 49er crew Harvey Hillary, now an RYA Elite Coach, who I sailed with five years ago at the 49er Worlds in Hawaii. A five-year gap is quite a time lag in a boat as sensitive as the 49er, especially when the wind was at times gusting over 25 knots at Grafham. However, familiarity came back surprisingly quickly as we battled our way round the course, except for one poorly-executed bear-away at the windward mark which put us out of the running against the other excellently sailed 49ers of Ian Martin/Ben McGrane and Roger Gilbert/Olivier Vidal. However after eventually getting going again, Harvey and I were getting increasingly comfortable with the boat until the final run when we heard a ping come from the top of the mast, and saw the gennaker slip a foot from the masthead.

That should have rung alarm bells in our heads at that point but we were having far too much fun to think about what might be going on up top. One gybe and two minutes later, the problem became a lot more obvious when the kite broke away from the halyard and fluttered to the water. Harvey immediately ran in to start retracting the wayward gennaker into the safety of the chute, but it was too late. The kite quickly turned into sea anchor and as the boat slowed and pivoted round the gennaker, it quickly became apparent that for us, the Grafham Grand Prix was over. When we got the boat ashore we discovered that the lashing that holds the spinnaker turning block on to the mast had snapped. This was when we heard the initial ‘ping' at the top of the mast, at which point the full force of the gennaker would have been hanging off the exit hole in the glassfibre top section.

In retrospect we were very lucky that the ageing spinnaker halyard decided to snap as soon as it did, as what has happened to other 49er sailors in similar circumstances is that the loaded halyard has rapidly sawn its way down the front face of the mast. A thousand pounds worth of top section ruined for the sake of one piece of snapped rope. So with that in mind, I was thankful for a broken spinnaker halyard rather than broken mast, and I had to remind myself of my recent Roll Tacks advice that this time of year is the ‘best' time to break equipment.

The Bloody Mary is an event where you have to be prepared for the unexpected. It's not a race that you'd ever want to consider doing just before your national championship, as you can't rule out the prospect of a collision. However, what I hadn't foreseen was the problem of running aground! This time I was crewing another RYA Olympic coach, Barrie Edgington, in the front of our International 14. It didn't look like it was going to be a great day for trapeze boats. Indeed a good deal of the faster handicap boats including most of the Fireball fleet took one look at the lack of wind and turned around and went home. Not only was there a lack of wind but there was an excess of rain, although at least it wasn't that cold. I remember doing the Bloody Mary more than 20 years ago in a Topper and not being able to ease the mainsheet at the top of the beat because the tail had frozen into a coil in the bottom of the boat. Fortunately global warming seems to have done us a favour in this respect...

These days the Toppers are the slowest boats permitted in the senior Bloody Mary, and they set off on the first start at 12pm. From there the motley assortment of dinghies, which numbered a slightly disappointing 196 this year, set off at various times until the fastest boats set off somewhere around 1pm. By the way, 50 different classes were represented at the event, working out at an average of just 3.92 boats per class. How crazy is that? It's both a wonderful and terrifying statistic, highlighting both the enormous variety and dilution of sailing classes in this country, a cause for celebration and concern in equal measure. But from a personal point of view, at least there was a good turnout of International 14s and it was clear we were going to have a battle just beating our mates, let alone the rest of the fleet.

The slower boats had set off in no more than a Force 2, and so we were encouraged when we could actually get marginal twin-wiring off the start line. It doesn't take much to get the 14 moving and we were making good progress in the first few minutes. We got one of the better starts off the committee boat end of the line, but Kimball Morrison and Louise Hickey had tacked off almost immediately and hooked into a massive right-hand shift to take a useful lead around the first mark, which was laid at the end of the peninsula which cuts Queen Mary Reservoir almost in two. Barrie and I rounded in second, and we were keen to shave the mark as close as possible in order to keep clear air as we tried to sail over the top of the slower boats ahead of us. Unfortunately we cut it a little too fine as we whacked into the submerged part of the peninsula with a nasty thud. Ouch! and Doh! Stupid and greedy to do that, but we leaned the boat away and managed to get going again without too much loss of distance.

A good three-way battle ensued in our fleet between Kimball and Louise, father and son team Andy and Tom Partington, and ourselves. We figured that in the light conditions the Thames A-Rater would be the boat to catch, and the 14s were making a bit of ground there too. Perhaps the big win was on! When you're sailing a fast boat like a 14 the key to success in a pursuit race like the Bloody Mary is to avoid traffic and to stay in clear air for as long as possible. You also hope that as you come up behind Lasers with an hour of the race to go, that they'll admit defeat and wave you past. Of course, you can't demand it as a right, because overtaking boat must keep clear. So you never quite know what to expect. You're searching for any expression on the sailor's face to get an inkling about whether or not they're going to let you go without incident. After all, it's a pretty optimistic Laser sailor that believes he can still beat an International 14 to a finish line that's still an hour away.

You can probably guess what's coming, can't you! Yes, of course the vast majority of slower boats did indeed let us past as we took their wind for only a few seconds before continuing down the track. But then we met Mr Do-or-Die in his Laser. Barrie moved to luff above the Laser and just as our bowsprit and gennaker was about to pass his transom he luffed up to attack. Barrie rapidly bore away and did well not to knock Mr Do-or-Die's head off with the bowsprit. Actually by this time the wind had died off to a virtual drifter, so all the action was now in slow motion. We passed to leeward of the Laser and had a good laugh about it - after I'd remonstrated with Mr Do-or-Die first of course. That's my job to argue with other competitors and generally verbalise the emotions on board our boat, as Barrie has a public reputation to maintain, seeing as he's a respected pillar of the RYA.

As the race wore on, the wind kept on shifting round and dying all the time, until it became a full-on driftathon. At this point, every boat was moving at virtually the same speed, regardless of its size or handicap. Indeed the RS400s that we had overtaken 15 minutes earlier started closing up to us and were threatening to overtake. Meanwhile the drizzle continued to pelt the sails and prevent the tell-tales from ever doing their job. My job was now to lie on the foredeck and look intently at the luff of our Mylar fully-battened jib for any signs of movement. It was very hard to know where the wind was coming from, if indeed it was coming from anywhere, and at times like these you would happily swap your hi-tech lightweight sail for a knackered old Dacron sail with all the filler knocked out of it. That way you might actually see the sail twitch if the wind does change.

With 20 minutes to go, as we travelled the same speed as the singlehanded Comet dinghy nearby, Barrie and I knew the game was up for winning the Bloody Mary, so we decided to focus on defending our slim lead in the 14s. However the Partingtons kept the boat sliding along in seemingly no breeze, while all we could do was watch them sail out from underneath us. Then at 2.30pm the finish gun fired and it was a matter of racing until you crossed the closest finish line on the course (the race committee had laid three different finishes around the reservoir). About 45 minutes after the finish gun, we finally crossed the line as a new zephyr of wind blew across the reservoir. We had completed two laps of Queen Mary in an hour and a half.

We hoisted the gennaker to try to beat the traffic returning to shore, and for the first time in the day we were fully twin-wiring and easing sails. Five minutes after finishing we were hooning towards the pontoons at high speed, with sails still up and a daggerboard that we didn't yet know would come up, after that running aground incident earlier. It was chaos at the pontoons as sails flapped and boats bumped into each other. The wind was now up to a very respectable - but by now completely unwanted - Force 4. God really was having a good laugh at the Bloody Mary competitors, and no doubt the Fireball sailors who went home earlier are having a good laugh reading this. When we finally got the boat ashore and safely on its trolley, Mad Jack Nicholson - who had been providing an ongoing commentary of the race for spectators in the clubhouse - pointed out that the wind had turned through all four corners of the compass during the two and a half hours of the race.

The funny thing is, if we'd have gone home early and not done the race, I wouldn't have had any regrets. But having done the race, with all its quirky moments, and despite the sheer frustration of the latter half of the race where the wind died to nothing, I wouldn't have missed it for anything. The Bloody Mary really is a whacky race, but it's an absolute classic. Barrie and I finished 48th, with the Partingtons first trapeze boat in 38th. It wasn't a year for a fast boat. Instead it was the National 12s' turn to shine, with Graham Camm and Zoe Ballantyne beating Caroline Martin and Andy Douglas to the coveted trophy. Well done to them. You need a lot of skill and a hefty dose of luck to win the Bloody Mary, but the vast array of different boats that have won it over the years shows that in a pursuit race, almost every dog has its day.