Miami, Florida
February 14, 2008

We pulled up four places to take over fourth place overall today at the 2008 Yngling Women’s World Championship, giving ourselves a good chance to win Bronze in the Medal Race tomorrow and an outside chance to win Silver.

Photo courtesy www.yngling.com & www.photoboat.com

It was the beginning of a day of upsets and surprises as everyone on the course fought to master the tricky puffs and shifts. It is a measure of the day’s challenges that eight of the top ten boats at the event sailed their worse race of the week today.

Sarah Ayton’s British team turned in a strong performance this week and amassed a sufficiently big lead to win the Gold Medal and the championship Linge Cup ahead of tomorrow’s race. For the other nine boats competing it will be an intense fight for the podium places.

In the first race today we had a decent start but then watched the boats to windward of us getting the pressure one at a time and accelerating away from us like people climbing on an escalator. Our boat speed didn’t feel great in these conditions. There were plenty of opportunities to gain and plenty of chances to lose and we bounced around between 20th and eighth to finish tenth.

The second race was more of the same except that we consistently managed to get out of phase with the shifts and finished 21st. It was our worst finish of the series and our drop race.

The breeze was increasing as the day wore on and we changed to a heavier jib for the last race which proved to be a very good move. With a great start we were able to play the shifts from both side of the course. Pretty quickly it was a contest between a Russian boat and us and although we never caught them we scored a comfortable second place.