470 Team USA: Still Leading Sail Melbourne!
January 18th, 2008 by tyler.cheung
Dear Friends,
We are still winning the Sail Melbourne Asia Pacific Regatta! It is the fifth day of the regatta, and we’ve been at the top of the score board every day, ahead of 47 other boats! We only have one race to go, the medal race, and we are 14 points ahead of the Japanese boat in 2nd place (currently ranked 4th in the world). We are also 34 points ahead of the 3rd place Italian team (currently ranked 1st in the world), which means that we’re mathematically guaranteed either 1st or 2nd at an ISAF Grade 1 Event. Fantastic! We only have one race left, the medal race on Saturday, January 19th. The medal race is against only the top 10 teams, the points count double and can not be discarded.
Yesterday, Thursday, we finished 1st and 5th, and our lead on the 2nd place team shrank from 7 to 4 points. Today, Friday, we finished 6th and 31st. For racing details, and to find out why we are so happy about the 31st, please read on!
Thursday was another windy, shifty day, and we couldn’t wait for racing. The first race was sailed in about 14-16 knots. We again had a good start and worked the shifts up the middle of the first upwind. We were 2nd at the first windward mark, in pretty good shape, but with a big pack of boats behind us. We had a slow downwind, and rounded the leeward mark in approximately 5th. Next was a brilliant upwind that found us closing on the lead boat by the top of the beat. We caught the last two shifts upwind before the windward mark to put us well ahead in 1st! We managed to stay ahead of the boats behind us, and crossed the line with our first bullet of the regatta. The second place Japanese team was in 2nd right behind us.
The breeze built to more than 20 knots by the end of the second race. The committee sent us on a longer course with an extra lap in it. We did our same routine on the first leg: good start and play the shifts up the middle. We were barely in the top 10 at the first windward mark, and more or less held that position for the first downwind. As the breeze increased for the second lap, we did not make the correct mast bend changes, and were not as fast as our usual heavy air speed. We played the shifts well, but found ourselves back in about 13th around the second windward mark with our rival Japanese team in 1st. Not the point margin that we needed! The most important part of the next downwind was that we were able to make the right adjustments to be blazing fast on the next upwind! We played the shifts well and were simply sailing faster than the other boats. We were in 3rd at the last windward mark, and we finally passed a boat downwind to be 2nd going into the finish when a semi-disaster struck: at the last mark before the finish the spinnaker sheet and the main sheet both got tangled up in the main sheet cleat. Just as we were saving ourselves from almost capsizing, Isabelle overzealously dropped the spinnaker to ensure we really would not tip over. By the time we had the sail back up again, we crossed the line in 5th. Never had a 1-5 felt like such a bad day.
Going into today, Friday, we were only 4 points ahead of the 2nd place Japanese team, but had separated in our total points enough from the rest of the field that we could only be challenged by that one team for the final places. Our biggest asset going into today was our consistency. Even though we had only won one race, our worst race was a 10th place. As in most regattas, the worst race is dropped from the final score. So, while we were only throwing out 10 points, the Japanese team behind us was throwing out a 23. We knew that one sure way to get points on the other team would be to force them to have a race worse than 10th and hopefully worse than their 23rd because we were guaranteed a minimum of 10th (since we could keep our currently discarded 10th place race and discard any worse race).
The wind was light today, with only 5 to 8 knots of wind. In the first race we again had a good start and a solid first windward leg. We rounded the mark in approximately 4th, in a very tight pack, with the Japanese team not far behind. We held even on the second downwind. On the second upwind we did not cover the Japanese team behind us and got caught outside of a shift. The Japanese passed us to finish the race 3rd and we were 6th. Our lead had just shrunk to only 1 point — a little too close for comfort!
In the second race we had an alright start towards the pin, left, end of the line. It turned out that the Japanese had a worse start further left than us. We played the first shifts, and found ourselves sailing towards the right side of the course with the Japanese trailing us! All we cared about was getting to the first mark ahead of the Japanese while slowing them down if possible. We accidentally fouled a boat, quickly spun a 720 penalty turn, and arrived at the first buoy overlapped with the Japanese in approximately 15th. We got ahead of them downwind, and intentionally slowing down, got them overlapped with us. We pinned them to an edge of the racecourse on starboard where we were inside and they could not jibe, and came back to the downwind marks in about 25th place. Sweet! The next upwind was fun. We stayed ahead of the Japanese giving them bad air when possible. We did not know how many boats were over early at the start, so we wanted to push them back to 28th place in order to be certain of giving them a finish worse than 23rd after boats had been disqualified. We accomplished our goal, crossing the finish line with them in 30th and us in 31st! We now both had new worst races to discard. They kept their 23rd, we kept our 10th, and we instantly gained 13 points on them to increase our lead to 14 points!
In tomorrow’s medal race we need to finish no worse than 7th and we automatically win or if Japan finishes worse than 2nd we automatically win. Stay tuned!!
Erin and Isabelle
470 Team USA