Bloody Mary

I can’t honestly say that I was looking forward to competing in the Bloody Mary. This dinghy pursuit race is the biggest event of the winter calendar in the UK, but it can be a brutal event. The past few weeks, southern England has looked more like Finland, having been covered in thick snow. The difference is that when it snows in Finland, the country doesn’t grind to a halt. In the UK, snow brings chaos. It also threatened the cancellation of the 37th Bloody Mary, something that Queen Mary Sailing Club would only ever do as a last resort.

Looking at the forecast, under normal circumstances there would have been no way that I would have bothered to get out of bed that Saturday morning. With sub-zero temperatures, and a wind chill from a strong northerly breeze threatening to make a freezing day feel Arctic, the prospect of competing in the Bloody Mary was not my idea of fun.

But there were three reasons why I had to be there.

1. I had just put together a new winter travellers series of some of the big doing the multiclass events, and the SailJuice Global Warm-Up was kicking off with this year’s Bloody Mary.

2. Rodney Cobb, the Devoti D-1 dealer in the UK, and his wife Sue had spent a good deal of the week battling through snow to fetch a brand-new boat from Holland. They were driving up from the Eurotunnel, having stayed in France the previous evening.

3. Father of the D-1 Luca Devoti had flown over from Italy, so making the 45 minute drive up the motorway from Winchester was the least I could do.

I bumped into Luca in the clubhouse that morning, and he told me that I must be mad to be competing in this event. I couldn’t disagree, but my only hope of chickening out of competing was if Rodney and Sue didn’t show up in time for me to make the start. But they did!

Luca and the Cobbs helped me unpack and regard the brand-new D-1 just in time for me to make the start. The only adjustment I needed to make to anything was cutting the gennaker sheets a little bit shorter and and then I was ready to go. No more excuses.

As I launched from the pontoon, Cherub sailor Peter Barton called out “good luck!” in a tone of voice that made me feel he didn’t think it would be too long before I fell in and gave the crowd some entertainment. I was determined not to provide any more entertainment than I could get away with.

I had a bit of time to get myself settled on the water before the 1239 start time loomed for the three D-1s that had turned up, myself, Adrian Brunton, and local Queen Mary member Tim Garvin.

For just three boats on the start line, it was surprisingly competitive, and I had to duck out of making the perfect pin end start, doing a quick bear away just before the gun to start to leeward of the other two. By the first windward mark I had the narrowest of leads from Adrian and Tim, and set about hoisting my bright yellow gennaker and grabbing a slightly bigger lead as we all launched into hyperspace. Trouble was, none of us quite knew where the next planet was.

The Bloody Mary has been known to attract in excess of 500 boats, all setting off at slightly different times depending on their class handicaps. It’s a tortoise and hare race with the smaller boats setting off first and the fastest setting off last, which means that unless you’re in a Topper dinghy you’ve nearly always got someone to follow around the course.

But this time, with a a record low turnout of just 61 boats, it was a lot harder trying to work out where to go next. Too late I realised that the next mark required a gybe, and with the wind gusting up to 20 knots, there was little time to faff around.

I threw the boat through the gybe and hoped for the best. Gybe survived! But the gennaker was flailing everywhere, and in my hurry to get the chute back into the sock, the kite sheets had wrapped around the wrong side of the gennaker pole.

I rounded just behind Adrian and Tim, but knew at some point that I had to go forward to sort the mess. “No time like the present,” I thought to myself as I left the boat to its own devices to try to go forwards. The boat wasn’t going to tolerate me being in the wrong place for too long, however, and inevitably I capsized.

By the time I had got things sorted again and was up and sailing, Adrian and Tim were a long way ahead. I set about seeing what I could do to catch them, although I noted the 505 was passing me with barely 20 minutes of the race completed. Looked like this was going to be a race for a trapeze boat, not an instrument of hiking torture. And I was right, the 505 went on to win the race.

Around the top mark near the clubhouse, aware that I was being watched and commentator Mad Jack would be humiliating me with his wry observations on the microphone, I tried to hoist the kite as quickly but as safely as possible. Job done, and away we flew back down to the far end of the reservoir again. Beginning to make inroads into some of the boats ahead, even if the 505 was never going to be caught.

More hiking, and playing some big wind shifts as the breeze gusted even stronger, and I was getting a bit closer back to Tim.

At the next windward mark, I hoisted the kite just before a big gust hit. Then I set the gennaker for what would be the final time. I looked up to see the mast folding in half. Failing to react in time, I fell into windward, but didn’t have to wait too long before one of the Queen Mary rescue teams picked me up and towed me back, bedraggled and defeated, back to shore.

“God wasn’t with you today, Andy,” said Luca as he came to meet me. He also held his arms up in mock surrender, accusing me of giving up as easily as the Italian army, which under the circumstances I thought was a bit harsh. I apologised to Rodney for having gone to so much effort to get the boat there for me, and he apologised to me. But the truth was, it was no one’s fault, other than whoever did the lamination on the bottom of the broken carbon top mast. It was a rare manufacturing error, and I had earned the dubious distinction of being the first to break a D-1 mast.

The one consolation was that at least now I had the excuse of being able to pack up the early. The Bloody Mary was good fun while it lasted, but under the same circumstances, would I do it again? Well, Petr, the Devoti videographer asked me that question on video, and stupidly I said: “Of course, it’s the Bloody Mary!” In England we call that a “Steve Redgrave moment”, after four-time Olympic gold medallist rower gave the world permission to shoot him if he should ever be seen in a rowing boat again. He couldn’t stay away from rowing, and broke his promise by going on to win a fifth gold medal. So will I break my promise, and stay in bed instead of coming back to the Bloody Mary next year? Depends if I can get that video down off YouTube and remove the evidence. The Bloody Mary? You’d have to be bloody mad....

Andy Rice, www.SailJuice.com