Bronze at Miami OCR
We have just finished up the Rolex Miami Olympic Class Regatta. We were in Miami for two weeks leading up to the event. For the first week we trained with the British team. The second week we had a four day, five team series of round robins. The teams were from Great Britain, Finland, Netherlands, and Russia. It was a great warm up for the event. A big thank you goes out to the umpires who came down to help us - Mike, Peter, Debi, and David.
There is a new format for the World Cup events this year. Instead of being spilt into three groups, we are now spilt into two groups. We were seeded into the A group. We raced six races the first day and won them all. We had the second day of the event off and then finished up the round robin on the third day. We were seeded first out of our group with a record of 10-1.
In the quarterfinals, we were matched up against Tamara Echegoyen and her team from Spain in a first to three points series. There were a lot of close races but we ended up winning the series 3-0.
In the semi-finals we faced Olivia Price and her team from Australia. The day started out light and the breeze increased all day. We won the first race. The next three races did not go as smooth. We got some penalties and were able to get rid of some of them but not all. We lost the series 1-3. We learned some good lessons from this series and won’t make the same mistakes again.
In the petit finals we raced Silja Lehtinen from Finland in a first to two points series. It was light and getting lighter as the morning progressed. In the first race we started to windward of her at the pin and were able to hold her all the way to layline. We extended some and won the race. In the second race, we had a split start, with us at the pin. We tacked at the gun and were leading at the first cross. It was tight all the way upwind with them rounding just behind us at the first mark. On the downwind, they were set up in a good place to match our gybe. They matched and we held on for as long as we could but eventually they rolled us. We gybed and rolled them but they were able to gybe for the leeward mark. At the mark, Silja did not have the best rounding and left just enough space for us to get inside her at the mark. We tacked and took the right. We were leading at the next windward mark by about two lengths and we able to hold and win the race and the Bronze medal.
We are taking this week off. We will be back in Miami next week for another four team training session. We would like to thank our coach Dave Perry and the US Sailing Team AlphaGraphics for all of their continued support.
