GBR Match Race Girls

After a nervous half hour of 0 knots, the breeze stayed in long enough this afternoon to complete the second round robin ready for the semi finals and finals tomorrow.

This morning seems a long time ago! We had a slightly frustrating day in the end, even though we still won all but three of our 22 round robin matches. Short courses meant the start was everything today, and sure enough the starts we won we extended our lead to comfortable wins. However, in the starts we didn’t win, we had a little more to do! Luckily we’ve put a lot of work this week into our pre start communication linked with our timing and tactics and it feels like everyday we are making great progress for the future… and for tomorrow!

Finishing second after the double round robin to the Italian team helmed by Giulia Conti puts us up against the current third placed team of Lotte Meldgaard Pedersen (DEN) while Conti is matched up against Genevieve Tulloch’s team (USA). The semi finals and finals are scheduled to be best of 5 races and the forecast is showing a bit of wind for the afternoon, perhaps reaching 20–25 knots so the racing should certainly be exciting!

SailGroove focused their coverage of the Rolex Miami OCR today on the Women’s Match Racing. Having gone undefeated for the first three days, they managed to whip out the cameras just in time to record our first loss against Giulia Conti!

Tricky conditions today on the water with a 4–6 knot wind range that died down to nothing by 3.00pm. We only managed 4 flights today but again Annie, Ally and I maintained our run of wins to keep the yellow jersey!

Races 1 and 2 saw us up against the American teams of Christine Erdmann and Maegan Ruhlman, in which we comfortably won both. Up next was Mary Rook with Nicky and Bex who we won a penalty against with about 30 seconds to the start and when the umpires gave them a red penalty (meaning they had to take it straight away) we took advantage to get in a strong position and lead the race throughout.

As the wind started to die, time and distance became key to our pre-start strategy but this was actually our downfall in our pre-start against the Spanish team helm by Margarita Cameselle. After controlling her for the majority of the start we failed to lead back to the start at the correct time and started on the back foot. After winning the right side of the course up the first beat however we were able to ‘dial down’ at her on starboard and force a rushed tack therefore winning a penalty. Confident calls by Ally downwind meant we extended on the first run and the breeze just about held up for us to finish with a good lead.

After a half hour wait for the wind the race committee decided to call it a day, so unfortunately we are behind schedule and hoping the wind plays ball tomorrow to complete the second round robin leaving Friday clear for semis and finals.

We’ll keep you posted!

Waking up to sun and wind meant racing got underway just after 10.00 this morning for the first day of the Rolex Olympic Classes Regatta here in Miami. With two round robins scheduled there is plenty of racing to get in, so the 7 flights completed today were a great start to the event.

Today we raced against 2 American, 1 Italian, 1 Spanish and 1 fellow British team (Mary Rook, Nicky Macgregor and Bex Marriot) and sailed consistently well to finish the day with 5 wins out of 5. All of our races had common themes about them coming off the line equal but by having great speed and conservative tactics upwind we were able to extend to the windward mark and continue to lead around every mark. With the SB3′s asymmetric spinnakers there is a slight change in tactics from ‘the norm’ downwind, but we made a good step forward today and we’re ready to hit the ground running tomorrow morning!

Day 2 will see us up against some of the higher ranked teams to finish the first round robin. Results throughout the day should go up on the event website.