Should Graham Vials have won the Bloody Mary? His Bladerider certainly passed everyone else during Queen Mary's winter classic pursuit race, but he didn't get the win. That went instead to Rob Greenhalgh and Dan Johnson in their International 14.

Whether or not Graham should have been awarded victory has been cause for great debate on sailing forums and at sailing club bars. He got up at 4.30 in the morning to leave his Newcastle home for the long drive down to Staines. Would he have bothered, had he known that he was ineligible for the main prize? "Probably, yes I would have done," says Graham, who still enjoyed his warp-speed blast around Queen Mary, even if it didn't count for much.

Graham admits he hadn't read the notice of race for the Bloody Mary which states that only classes with an official Portsmouth Yardstick number are eligible for winning the event. So, it wouldn't have kept him away from the event, but it must be disappointing that he couldn't qualify to win the Bloody Mary.

Why should sailors like Graham be ineligible? Shouldn't anyone who wants to bring their dinghy to the Bloody Mary be allowed to compete for the prize? I asked Paul Schroeder, Queen Mary's commercial manager, why boats without an official PY number were excluded.

Paul said one of the main reasons for only accepting boats with official PYs was to prevent new manufacturers' one designs from turning up with a favourable, self-appointed handicap number and walking off with the prize. I remember this happening when two well-known Olympic sailors launched the then brand new Laser 4000 on an unsuspecting public at the Grafham Grand Prix, with the wings set at max width. They stormed off with the fast handicap prize.

As Paul says: "Builders under-egg the PY of their own boats. You have to be fair to all competitors, so someone who rocks up in an Enterprise stands a fair chance against someone who is sailing off a builder's nominated handicap." This is a fair point. Asking builders to give their own boats a fair handicap is like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas. They won't do it, and they shouldn't be allowed to handicap their own boats.

But this is a separate issue from Graham Vials and his Bladerider. After all, the Bladerider is just a one-design version of an International Moth. "Fundamentally the rules haven't changed in the Moth class for the last 20 or 30 years," says Graham. "The sail area is the same, the width of the boat is the same, all that has changed is that we now have hydrofoils." Such foils would have been legal 20 or 30 years ago, if only someone had been aware of their potential back then.

So it appears that the Moth has become a victim of its own success. Because it is capable of sailing at almost twice the speed of a non-foiling Moth in some conditions, it has been excluded from the PY system.

What about the International 14? It has just one hydrofoil on the rudder, which doesn't fully lift the boat out of the water like the Moth, but it certainly makes the boat more efficient. It adds a good two knots of boatspeed upwind, helps the boat point higher, and adds considerably more boatspeed downwind. But has it been excluded from the PY system? No, because - I would suggest - that the gains have been only incremental, as opposed to the Moth's which have been exponential.

As far as I can see, the Moth and the Fourteen fall into the same category, of development classes that are now outsailing their old handicaps. It's just that the order of magnitude by which the Moth now exceeds its old PY number is so large that it has been cast into outer darkness.

Meanwhile, the Fourteen is sailing to a very favourable PY number. Not to take away from Rob and Dan's performance at the Bloody Mary (after all, they are former 14 World Champions), but these days there is little to choose in boatspeed between a well-sailed 49er and a well-sailed 14. Yet the 49er sails off 747, while the 14 sails off 850.

The Merlin Rocket is another development class ‘bandit', in some people's view, including even Mark Barnes who races at the Merlin Nationals every year. "The boat is so well developed now, it could easily be racing off 1000, but it's still at 1019," he says. By the way, Mark and crew Pete Nicholson sailed their B14 to victory at the Steve Nicholson Memorial Trophy at Northampton Sailing Club. However, when Mark went up to receive his prize, he whispered in the organiser's ear that he thought the prize should have gone to someone else, pointing over at Richard Stenhouse.

The B14 and Musto Skiff race around a course at very similar pace to each other, so Mark was aware of Sten's speed around the Northampton race track, and was surprised to discover on the results sheet that he had beaten him for overall honours. We all know that Sten never capsizes (if you read my recent interview with him and his wife Kit), and it transpired that he had been recorded as having completed one less lap than he actually had. So Mark did the sporting thing and handed the trophy to Sten. Fair play.

Back to the main theme, though. What to do about handicapping boats that are out of the ordinary - whether it be the International Moth, the 14, or one of the manufacturers' new one-designs? I say let everyone compete in whatever boat they choose, and if there is no established PY number, make one up. If it's a new class, think of a number and then knock off 10 or 20, to peg it back a bit. This way, at least someone can feel like they're competing, even if they know they'll have an uphill struggle to win it.

I put that idea to Paul Schroeder for future Bloody Marys, and he was open to the possibility. "It's something we could consider, but that would have to be a club decision to change the nature of the Bloody Mary, because it's such a longstanding event." Paul says the club is very sensitive to the fall-out from this year's controversy, so much so that they are going to hold a strategy meeting to discuss the future of the Bloody Mary.

The Club has already discussed some options, such as having a prize for line honours as well as for handicap. "That sounds like a straightforward solution, until you consider how would you finish the race? Let's say the foiling Moth is the leading boat on the water, and the first boat in line for handicap victory is a Topper. If you finish the race at the Moth, by the time the Topper has reached that finish line, he could have been passed by another boat such as, say, a Merlin Rocket." This does sound like a can of worms, and in any case, it would be far preferable to have one clear, outright winner of the Bloody Mary, such as we have now.

So give every boat a handicap, even if it doesn't existing under the official scheme. Other events such as the John Merricks Tiger Trophy already do that. Indeed that's pretty much what the RYA said when I put these issues to the Technical Department.

"For a club to refuse the entry of a boat because it has no listed number is contrary to the purpose of the Portsmouth Yardstick Scheme." It adds: "Where a boat is not listed, or a club is unable to adjust a listed Portsmouth Number to suit, the entry should be accepted and the club should estimate a Trial Number."

By the way, if you want to follow up on the detail of this, you can find all the RYA official documentation at: www.rya.org.uk/KnowledgeBase/technical/pys.htm

The RYA response continues: "The discussion generated by the Bloody Mary emphasises the point that the RYA recommends that clubs should:

(a) give Trial Numbers to new boats and

(b) adjust numbers when racing experience on their waters indicates that the published numbers are not fair and most importantly, report their experiences to the RYA in the Yardstick Return.

"Even though the number of Yardstick returns and the boat-races covered by them has continued to increase, there are still clubs using the PYS but are not playing their part in keeping it up to date by making an annual Yardstick Return."

So, the RYA places the onus for allocating handicap numbers very much on the organising sailing club. That's as it should be. I hope the Bloody Mary strategy meeting produces a more inclusive notice of race for next year's event. But as to the Yardstick Return system, anecdotally I hear that a number of clubs have stopped filing their annual returns to the RYA because they find the system so long and laborious.

While the RYA is to be admired for attempting to run a system that is as fair and accurate as possible, it seems the current Yardstick Return system is so onerous that it is not getting back the data required to keep the handicap numbers up to date. Paul Schroeder, who works through the RYA figures every December in advance of the Bloody Mary, believes the sailing world is changing faster than the Yardstick Return system can cope with. He'd like to see a more dynamic, faster-changing system that reflects what we're all experiencing on the water. I think we'd all like that.

It's a message not lost on the RYA. The Technical Department's Bas Edmonds says: "The RYA has polled all of its affiliated clubs to try and find out exactly what could be done to make using the PYS easier as well as recommendations on making the Returns process simpler to use.

"Having taken on board all of the received comments, the RYA is working on a website scheme which will make returns much easier in the future as well as providing a much more comprehensive range of usable data for analysis."

While it's sad that Graham Vials didn't get his moment of glory at Queen Mary this year, he can at least take credit for catalysing some much-needed debate around the handicap system, and hopefully some good will come of it. And in any case, three weeks later, he raced his Bladerider to victory at a windy Tiger Trophy, sailing to a handicap of 800. More cause for debate, courtesy of Graham! I've got more to say on this subject, so we'll return to the thorny issue of handicapping in the next edition of Roll Tacks.