Three Bloody Marys, please

At the beginning of this year, Graham Vials' non-victory in the Bloody Mary caused a bit of a rumpus. Graham swept across the line in first place aboard his Bladerider Moth, but was ineligible for the main prize because the foiling International Moth does not have an official RYA Portsmouth Yardstick Number.

There were those who believed Graham deserved the trophy, and it is good to hear that Queen Mary Sailing Club has responded to the controversy with a considered discussion of how to take the event forwards.

These are difficult times for organisers of handicap events. In days of yore, dinghies used to travel at more or less similar speeds. There were no boats out there with a hyperspace button, certainly not like a Moth when it lifts clear of the water. So the biggest spread of speeds that a handicapper had to worry about was from an Optimist up to a 505. Gradually the 505 was eclipsed by the new breed of skiffs, the International 14, the Laser 5000, the 49er and so on. Now the new generation of foilers - the Moths and RS600FFs - are creating a handicapping headache on a much larger scale. Boats that - in the Moth's case - travel at Topper speed in sub-foiling conditions, and at warp speed once they start flying are virtually impossible to handicap unless you start taking windstrength into account.

So you can see why the Bloody Mary was struggling to know what to do with these boats. For this January's event, then, they have decided to have three separate categories for boats with a RYA-recognised PY, boats without a recognised PY, and for foilers (none of which currently have a recognised PY). This way, everyone has a shot at winning the Bloody Mary, including Graham Vials.

My personal preference would have been still to have one trophy, with all comers competing for that trophy. The answer to the boats without an established PY, foiling or non-foiling, would have been to impose a handicap number that would have been very difficult - but not impossible - for them to win against. Unlike Queen Mary, I see the distinction between official PYs and non-official PYs as an arbitrary one. We all have a pretty good idea of what a boat's handicap should be based on our own experience from club sailing.

So the Bloody Mary and any other major event should write its own handicap numbers where none exist. Apparently it was written into the rules of the Bloody Mary some 30 years ago that only boats with proper PYs would be eligible but this rule has become an anachronism. The dinghy world is so much more diversified now, with so many classes having cropped up in the last 15 years, that this rule affects a large proportion of potential participants in the Bloody Mary.

So while Queen Mary deserves praise for having considered the effects of Graham Vial's non-victory from January 2008, I'm a bit disappointed with the solution they've come up with. I hope the club has the courage to reinstitute a winner-takes-all trophy for 2010 and onwards. At some handicap events like the Grafham Grand Prix, you can win a division - say the slow handicap - but you can't win the event overall. Whereas on the other hand it's always been something special to say "I won the Bloody Mary", and to say that you beat 300 boats or however many competitors crammed on to the reservoir that day for this craziest, silliest, but most entertaining of races.

RS600FF Nationals

Still on the subject of pesky foilers, it was great to see that 16 boats made it to the inaugural RS600FF National Championships at Hayling Island in October. This is a great achievement for the class, and particularly for boatbuilder Linton Jenkins and Graham Simmonds, who has driven the class forwards in the past year and has also been the first to buy one of the new carbon hulls. There were also a couple of high profile sailors who turned up to have a go, including this year's International 14 POW Cup winner Alister Richardson and 49er Olympian Simon Hiscocks. Apparently Simon forgot he was also involved in another race that weekend, as one of the 31,000-odd participants in the virtual game of the Volvo Ocean Race. Simon received a text from the missus to tell him that he had forgotten to gybe his virtual VO70 while away at Hayling, and so his boat had beached on the shores of Africa. Oops!

18 years later

Well done to Nelly, aka Ian Pinnell, who has won the 505 World Championships after 18 years of trying. Having only recently teamed up with Carl Gibbon, the Midlands-based duo whopped the fleet in a light-air regatta in Mondello, Sicily. So often the bridesmaid (as was two years ago at Hayling Island when Mark Upton-Brown and Ian Mitchell won the Worlds) but always a measure of quality, Howie Hamlin crewed by Andy Zinn finished 2nd with 30 points, compared with Nelly/Carl's 13 points, the Brits being the only team to keep all their scores inside the top 10 in every race. Not bad when you think there were 122 boats coming off those gate starts. The quality oozes from the results sheet, with another former 505 World Champion Wolfgang Hunger crewed by Julien Kleiner coming 3rd, former Flying Dutchman Olympic Champion Jorgen Bojsen-Moller and his brother Jacob in 4th, and last year's World Champions Jan Saugmann and Morten Ramsbaek in 5th.

When I was crewing 470s in the early 90s, Wolfgang Hunger was god, a three-time 470 World Champion and probably the best 470 sailor never to win an Olympic medal. So anyone who can beat this guy has done something pretty special.

In the first two races, Nelly and Carl were pretty much the last boat to come out of the gate start, almost 7 minutes after the first boats started, because they wanted the right-hand side of the course to hook into better pressure by the headland. They scored 1,2 from those races, and consolidated their lead throughout the regatta. Very smart sailing in what Nelly says were extremely tricky conditions. There was no going up the middle of the course - no wind to be found there - so you had to go with your hunches and aim for a side and stick to it. Getting all top 10 results in that scenario is impressive indeed.

I could go on to comment that Nelly achieving his crown glory at the ripe old age of 47 is impressive too, were it not for the fact that all his major competitors must have either matched him or beaten him in the grey hair stakes. Howie is in his mid-50s (and bear in mind he's still right up there in the 18-foot skiff), and Wolfgang and the Bojsen-Mollers were doing most of their Olympic winning in the late 80s, so they are no spring chickens either!

This is no reflection on their abilities, as there is more and more evidence that people can go on to compete at the highest level for a long, long time. Ed Baird was 50 when he steered Alinghi to victory in the America's Cup last year, and he won the demolition derby that was the iShares Cup in the highly competitive VX40 circuit against much younger skippers such as Rob Greenhalgh, Alister Richardson and Chris Draper. And then in that toughest of sporting events there is Lance Armstrong's decision to come out of retirement in his late 30s for another crack at the Tour de France next year, and who would bet against him?

At least Carl Gibbon is only 27 years old, a bit of new blood coming through at the top of the 505 fleet, but by and large the 505 fleet seems to be getting older by the year. What will happen in another 10 years? Will they have to raise the 505's boom height to help Nelly and his rivals tack without doing themselves an injury? Only joking, but there is a serious point here. Not many young'uns coming through, it would seem.

At least numbers are strong internationally, with 122 boats in Sicily, and Nelly has every right to feel that of the 36 national, European and World titles he has amassed over the past quarter-century, this latest victory is the sweetest. Winning the Five-Oh Worlds has to be one of the toughest challenges outside of the Olympic circuit.

Nationally the class has been much more on the wane, which is a shame but not that surprising considering the high cost of a new 505 - or even a good secondhand one - compared with some of the more recent and faster mass-production skiff-type classes. So what is the answer? I'm not entirely sure, but one thing that would certainly help is a bit more communication about major events. To look at the Y&Y.com forum, I wasn't the only one who was frustrated by the lack of news coming out of Sicily. With 244 competitors in Sicily, and all those high-profile names from so many different countries, surely someone could have found the time to send out some reports. When you've got a great story a tell, it's a terrible shame to waste it.