Day 2: Repacharge Racing Tomorrow

March 29, 2010
Palma, Spain

Team Tunnicliffe completed the first round robin 5-2 to finish third overall in group B, at the Princess Sophia Trophy regatta. With this result, we will advance to the repecharge where we will battle with five other teams for the top two spots in order to advance to the Quarter finals.

Racing Postponed : Waiting For The Wind

Photo: (c) Deb Capozzi, March 2010

We sat around again today waiting for the breeze to fill in. The first group finally started racing just before 1pm, and we got sailing around 2:30pm. The wind was light and the seas were choppy which made the game about boat speed. Our first race was against Germany's Silke Hahlbrock. We controlled the start, and started to leeward which was necessary in all the races today. Unfortunately, we did one down-speed tack half way up the first leg and she managed to get over the top of us, which gave her control for the rest of the way around. At one point, we were down by about 4 boat lengths but caught up to within one boat length by the finish. But it wasn't quite enough.

The next race was against France's Claire Leroy. We had a good pre-start sequence with her, but she just got to the left of us at the gun and controlled the race from there. We couldn't pull her back in, given the wind's shiftiness. However, we learned plenty from the race.

Our final race was against Renee Groveneveld from The Netherlands. Our team was pretty fired up about our two losses earlier, so we were quite ready to win a race this time around. We controlled her the whole time, and drew a penalty on her. We led her off the line, and held her off the whole race to take the win and put our record at 5-2.

It was a tough day, in the fact that we lost two races, but we are here to learn as much as we can and we learned so much from these two losses. We are excited about racing tomorrow. We have a forecast for big breezes so the racing will be exciting. We ate a big dinner, and now we are fueled up and ready to go. You can check the results at the regatta website here (follow the link and then download the pdf file).

We would like to thank Carmeuse for their continued support of our campaign for the 2012 Olympics in London. We would also to thank USSTAG for their support.

Sail Hard,

Anna

Team Tunnicliffe