Greetings Race Fans,

As the subject suggests, our boat is what beat us today. We had a great start at the pin end and had great speed. We hit a few shifts and were in second when the cunningham block broke off of the mast. This hurt our speed upwind and we rounded the top mark in 3rd place, right behind Clark/Mergenthaler. Knowing that the cunningham was going to be needed for the rest of the race, we decided to sacrifice downwind speed and Alice rigged the cunningham on a spare block while Erin flew the spinnaker. We only lost one boat during the repair and quickly passed them again after rounded the leeward mark. But fate was not on our side today and about half way up the second windward leg our vang bail broke both rivets holding it into the boom. This significantly hurt our speed upwind, but we were still able to play some shifts and rounded in fifth, well ahead of the back half of the fleet. We had an opportunity to pass the British team downwind, but again the boat was not on our side. Almost immediately after setting the spinnaker, the cover on the halyard snapped and we were unable to keep our spinnaker halyard in the cleat. So, we dropped the spinnaker and sailed the rest of the way downwind and on the reach with just the jib and main. (Just for the record, the line that broke was NOT from our sponsor, Samson Ropes!) The back of the fleet caught up to us, but fortunately we had enough of a lead and only one other boat passed us. We finished the race in 6th.

The bad news is that our results put us in 7th overall and 2nd on the 2006 US Sailing Team, which is worse than we had hoped for. But Clark/Mergenthaler sailed a solid last race and we would not have had enough points between us even if our boat had cooperated with us during the race. The good news, though, is that we have figured out our speed problem upwind! We were sailing with too much bend in the mast, and when we straightened it today we were much faster. Overall it was a productive week even though our results didn't meet our goals.

Thanks for your support and emails cheering us on all week!

Cheers,
Erin and Alice