Qingdao China - August 15, 2008 - For the second day running, Qindao’s unpredictable weather permitted only one race on the Laser Radial course. I had an up and down day but fought my way back from 16th at the first leeward mark to fifth place at the finish. I’m still overall leader in the class, with a small cushion of five points to my nearest competition.

After a couple of hours in the boat park, we were called out to sea again and eventually started in an 8-10 knot puffy and shifty northeasterly. My start wasn’t very good. I was a little hesitant on the line and I had to claw back into contention on the first beat.

At the top mark I was 10th and I was pretty happy to be in that position. On the run the breeze kept filling from the left (upwind) side of the course so I kept working that side. The fleet really compressed coming into the leeward mark. I got a little antsy as I tried to work through the traffic and the judges yellow-flagged me for kinetics just three boat-lengths before the mark. I lost a lot of boats as I completed my two penalty turns and eventually rounded in 16th place.

I was none too happy with that situation but knowing that all the wind pressure was coming from the left, I headed that way as the wind picked up and got my aggression out. I got all the way out to the left-most boat and sailed a great leg to round the weather mark in sixth. My speed was not sufficient to catch anyone on the remaining legs but one boat in front of me was yellow-flagged on the last run and that let me slip by to take fifth place.

Tomorrow, Saturday, we’ll be trying again to get back on schedule, with three races slated to start at noon, weather permitting. The forecasters believe we’ll have less breeze than the 12-14 knots we saw at times today, but they expect it to be more stable. We’ll see.

I will be sending out daily reports like this but you can also follow the racing live on web-TV at www.nbcolympics.com. You can get leg-by-leg race updates and overall results if you go to http://www.sailing.org/olympics/resultscentre.php and click on Laser Radial Women in the left-hand column.

Until the Olympics are over, you’ll notice some changes in the content of my reports and where they are located on my website. To comply with International Olympic Committee regulations designed to protect its sponsors’ interests, my reports are appearing here on Anna's Qingdao Olympic Blog. There is also a link from the home page of my website. This blog page includes hotlinks to official results and competition photos.

Sail hard

Anna