September 1, 2011
Rochester, NY

We finished second at the US Sailing's 2011 Rolex International Women's Keelboat Championships to overall champions Cory Sertl and team. It wasn't the best day of racing today for us, but we hung close and managed to bring home the silver this time.

Going into the day, we were tied for first, with Sally Barkow and Team with Cory five points behind. The forecast was light, but the wind came through and we got in three great races.

Like I said, we didn't have a great start to the day with the first race being an 8th, and our second race being our drop for the event, finishing 18th. This meant that we had to count our 10th from the first day. This made the scores such that Sally and Cory were tied, with us 8 points behind. We knew, for the last race, that we needed to almost win the race and have those two take each other out.

We had a fantastic start and saw Cory deep off the line and couldn't see Sally either. Up the first beat, we held on to second place by the tip, but Cory sailed very well and got up to third place. Sally was deep enough at that point that we would be able to get second. We sailed hard and up the second beat defended the left and got passed by Cory and one other boat at the top, but we had quite a bit of distance to the next pack. Our game plan was to stay with the two boats in front of us and pass them when the time was right. Sally split to the right hand side of the course downwind. The pressure filled in from the right side and Sally made a big move on the fleet. The race finished with Sally squeaking across the line in first and us in 3rd. At that point we thought we had third place until later we found out that Sally had been disqualified for a protest between her and Cory.

We are happy with our finish, although not entirely satisfied. We relearned a lot about fleet racing that we can take forward into match racing.

Up next is Liz Bower's wedding to Tom Lewin this weekend before we head to Chicago for some training.

Additional thanks this week go to North Sails for their sails and boat for the regatta. We would also like to thank, Pat and Patti, Sandy and Kirk, and Linda for housing us. And to Jeff for fixing our winches earlier this week.

We would very much like to thank our Title Sponsor, Maclaren, our Gold Level Sponsors 11th Hour Racing and Laser Performance, and our Bronze Level Sponsors Carmeuse, Trinity Yachts, and Chicago Match Race Center for their continued support of our campaign for the 2012 Olympic Games. We would also like to thank US Sailing Team AlphaGraphics (USSTAG) and its sponsors for their continued support. Also, thank you to our private donors. Please remember that any and all donations/contributions to our campaign should be made payable directly to either The Sailing Foundation of New York (tax deductible) memo'd Anna Tunnicliffe, or to Anna Tunnicliffe.

Sail Hard,

And as usual, don't forget, email us your questions and comments. We love getting them and sharing our love of sailing and women's match racing.