Greetings race fans,

Today wrapped up the 470 World Championships. For us, although it was an incredible learning experience, it didn’t end on a good note. Over the past 3 days we had moved ourselves up to being the top US team in the standings. This was an incredible achievement given the rest of the US Teams had been training full-time for the majority of the summer leading up to the Worlds. Going into this morning we stood in 15th and only 2 points out of 14th. It was about 20 knots of breeze in the first race with big steep waves created by the ebbing current. We won the start and had good speed upwind. On the second windward leg, about 2/3’s of the way up the beat, we were in the top 10 boats in the race and positioned well to move up. Our vang bail on the boom snapped. There was nothing we could use to repair the broken metal in the boat. We used one of our spare pieces of line in the boat to tie the vang to the main sheet block on the boom and finished the race. But as anyone who sails knows, in 20 knots of breeze, going upwind with a crew trapezing or downwind in huge waves with a skying boom is very unstable and very slow. We were lucky to beat a few boats in the race. We immediately began to repair the problem when the race was over. We dropped the main sail and untied all the control lines off our broken boom and began putting on a replacement boom. We couldn’t just replace the vang bail because it slides on a car and other riveted parts were blocking sliding on a new bail. About the time when we started attaching the new boom, the next race started. The race committee had given less than 10 minutes between races. It was very disappointing to miss the last race of the event. We sailed into the beach as we watched the rest of the fleet racing up the first windward leg.

As expected, our two races (or lack of races for us) hurt us badly in the standings. We finished 21st in this World Championship. Had we finished the first race today in the position we were in when the break down occurred and had another just average race in the second race, we would have finished 20-30 points ahead of the next US boat in the standings and moved up from our 15th place standings this morning. Finishing well in this regatta wasn’t essential for anything other than our pride, unless we finished in the top 8. A top 8 finish at World Championship would have earned us additional support from the US Olympic Committee. On the upside from this regatta, we improved drastically over the course of the event (and over the past 3 weeks an immeasurable amount). We were going both upwind and downwind today as fast, or faster, than several top teams in the world. We even passed last year’s World Champions while we were right next to them in the race. It was a huge confidence booster.

Erin flies out tonight to go back to work tomorrow morning in Connecticut and Alice starts her new job in San Francisco in 2 weeks. We plan to practice on some weekends this fall and come back for the fall US Team Qualifying event in the last weekend of October held in San Francisco. Our boat will then get shipped to Florida for the winter racing season. We plan to do a lot of campaign organization over the next few months and are in the process of raising funds for a new boat that we will ideally take delivery of next summer in Europe before the European Championships in Hungary. If you would like to help our efforts or know others who would, please visit our website (www.470TeamUSA.com) for more information.

Cheers,
Erin and Alice