Greetings race fans,

Day 4 of the 470 Worlds was another milestone for us. We had our best day so far at the Worlds and again were the top US Team for the day’s races. Today’s wind was lighter than yesterday, but still a great day for racing. It was about 12-15 knots all day. The current was only a small factor in the first race, followed by strong flood in the second race. The wind came from the same direction it has come every day, 235 degrees, or straight from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Race one was frustrating for us. We had good fleet placement and solid tactics, but our upwind point was struggling again. Had we even had equal point to boats around us we would have finished in the top ten. We had to settle for 15th in race one, which was a little disappointing, but still a solid finish.

We didn’t have the same pointing problem as yesterday so we weren’t sure what the problem was. Between races we got the help of our coach Pease Glaser and the US Team coach Skip Whyte. They helped us to move the draft back in our main sail and as well as remove depth out of it to better suit the flat water conditions. Pease also suggested we remove depth out of our jib by increasing jib cunningham and then moving our lead forward to reduce the twist created by increased cunningham. Those changes, combined with slightly more aggressive technique, paid off. We won the pin end of the start, punched, and were the lead pin boat going left to current relief from the flood. A few bigger teams had a little bit of speed on us, but we hit the layline to the windward mark perfectly and were third coming into the mark. We missed the first puff downwind and had a bad leeward mark rounding in the current. This put us in about 6th. Two more boats passed us upwind on the next beat on some shifts by the shore. But that wouldn’t last. We did a windward bag set onto the reach. Our spinnaker head got caught in our jib halyard and we had to wait out the length of the reach to get it out. Our usually fast reaching speed had to settle for even to the boats around us with a smaller spinnaker for this leg as a result of the trapped halyard. Once on the downwind, we were right behind the Spanish and Japanese. The halyard quickly freed itself and we were back up to full speed. We broke left on the downwind leg to get out into the flood to help us. It paid off. When we jibed back toward the Japanese and Spanish, we were ahead. The Japanese tried to take the inside going into the last reach to the finish but we drove high and got the pole on the head stay just in time. It was an easy reach to the finish for us. We finished 6th, our best finish so far. We are confident we are finally starting to put things together. Our speed has improved and our boat handling is finally starting to get to a world class level. There is still a long way to go, but the last three weeks have been a huge upward improvement for us.

We will be putting photos up on our website from the last few regattas in the upcoming days. So stay tuned and check them out.

Stay tuned,
Erin and Alice