We won!!! We only had two races today as the wind held true to the forecast and picked up into the 30's, cancelling racing for the afternoon, resulting in no finals. But as it turned out, we completed the round robin and finished with a 16-0 record.  

2012 Champions - Semaine Olympique Francaise De Voile 

We hit the water this morning, not too long after we were supposed to head out and the race committee got racing underway immediately. We had two races scheduled, our final two of the round against Team Macgregor (GBR) and Team Leroy (FRA).

The waves were still big from yesterday's wind and the wind today was in the mid-teens when we started racing. The wind couldn't make up its mind as to what it wanted to do, and so there were periods of breeze where it was only 12-14kt and times when it hit 18kt. This made setting up the boat for all the wind conditions, and driving through the waves quite a challenge. But the girls did a great job with the sails and we found a groove that gave us quite fast boat speed.

Race one of the day was our most exciting. In the prestart, Team Leroy earned a penalty for hitting us from behind. As they hit us, it forced the boat into a tack resulting in us getting pinned and having to follow them into the line at the boat. After a small extension from them in a tacking dual, we were able to break free, sail fast and catch up the distance that we had lost. We rounded the top mark right on their tail, but they had a slightly better set and pulled out on us a few lengths. We matched their gybe and sat on their wind to close the gauge a little and when they gybed back to port, we were in position to go for the roll. As we went to roll over them, they luffed us. We dropped our spinnaker, but as it dropped it floated down onto them and we earned a penalty, neutralizing theirs. Both boats doused, gybed and were now jib reaching to the leeward mark. We caught a wave and surfed over her just as we hit the [rounding] zone and so were entitled to round the mark ahead. From there, we made some good decisions around the course and extended our lead to take the race.

We are very excited that we came out on top at this event, our last event leading into our Olympic Trials which start on May 4th. We have been working on a lot of small things in our game, and will continue to fine tune them this week in Weymouth as we do a few more days of training.

We would very much like to thank our Title Sponsor, Maclaren, our Gold Level Sponsors 11th Hour Racingand Laser Performance, and our Bronze Level Sponsors Carmeuse, Trinity Yachts, Chicago Match Race Center, and Sperry Top-Sider for their continued support of our campaign for the 2012 Olympic Games. We would also like to thank St Francis Sailing Foundation, and US Sailing Team Sperry Top-Sider 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 to Sailing Foundation of New York, in the memo write 'Anna Tunnicliffe' and send to Sailing Foundation of New York (this one is tax deductible); or to Anna Tunnicliffe (via PayPal). (Please follow the links for more information. Thank you.)

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.