Olympic Trials Day 3
October 8th, 2007 by Isabelle
Dear Friends,
Today’s update will be brief because we are tired after a long, hard day of sailing. We finished 2-1 today in races sailed in a light sea breeze. The women’s leaders, Amanda Clark and Sarah Mergenthaler, finished 3-3. We inched closer in the scores, and are now 9 points behind them. We also moved up on the scoreboard, although we don’t know by how much since complete scores have not yet been posted.
In both races we matched Amanda and Sarah tack for tack, and stayed ahead of them. In the first race we had a good start near the boat, while Amanda and Sarah had a poor start further down towards the pin. As they tacked out to find a clear lane, we matched them and never let them get one. We stayed ahead of them for the entire race, and crossed the finish line in 2nd.
In the second race, we engaged them before the start of the race, and forced them to tack out and start behind every single boat and the boat, right, end of the line while we had a good start at the pin. Amanda and Sarah protested us in a pre-start incident where no foul occurred. We had a scary moment when Amanda and Sarah caught a right shift and were looking good. We waited until we had a nice left shift, took that across, and just barely crossed Amanda and Sarah. We again matched them tack for tack, and managed to get a boat in between us. We led the race most of the way around. Below are two photos from the finish of the second race of the day — please note the mayhem behind us (Amanda and Sarah are the boat with their spinnaker down in the first photo) and the bright smiles as we cross the line and wave to the race committee! At the end of the day, Erin had to go into the protest room against Amanda to prove that we had done nothing wrong. Good job Maxwell!
We have two more races tomorrow, and then will have a day off Wednesday. We are looking forward to another strong day of racing! The regatta is still long — 10 more races — and only one score will be dropped so there is a LOT of racing let.
For complete scores, please visit:
http://www.ussailing.org/olympics/OlympicTrials/race_results.html
For some great photos by Rick Roberts, Under the Sun Photos, please visit:
http://www.abyc.org/event_specific_photos.cfm?id=214
Best,
Erin and Isabelle