Second Place at the BoatUS Santa Maria Cup!

The Santa Maria Cup in Annapolis was unfortunately not shined upon by the wind gods, and we had four light air days where the breezes were fighting with each other rather than cooperating on our behalf. Sadly I had caught a pretty bad cold on the flight to Annapolis, so while many of the other teams were sunbathing in bikinis, I was still in a jacket, sneezing anytime a zephyr of 2 knots came through. I have to thank our team of Liz Hall on the bow, Jamie Haines on the jib and downwind tactics, and newcomer Elizabeth Kratzig on the main and spinnaker and upwind tactics, who kept me together both on the race course (Elizabeth thankfully has us constantly checking in with the wind direction-even as it shifted 180 degrees) and as a human being (Liz Hall has an incredibly stocked medical cabinet she travels with, and Jamie is the queen of homeopathic remedies for NZ and GB).

We knew the weather was bad when we were told Thursday night that the Santa Maria Cup had never been this far behind in races before, and then we went out and were only able to get one race the next day. We finally finished the first round robin, racing its final race on Saturday, which left us ranked second on a tie-break, as we had beaten both Katie Spithill (last year’s MR World Champion), and Liz Baylis (last year’s second place in World Champs) in the round robin races. The breeze then died again and we sat out there for about 6 hours as our Northerly gradient fought the Southerly seabreeze, neither one staying long enough to actually get a start off for our semi-finals, though the other match raced one race with three different 180 degree shifts—kites up on the downwind, then sailing upwind on the downwind leg and kites back up for the upwind leg, etc. We were happy not to have raced in that. They finally moved us straight to the finals matches at four, so we were up against Claire Leroy (currently ISAF ranked #1 Women’s Match Racer) to see who would get the win.

Unfortunately Claire got the better of us in the first start as a big left shift 15 seconds to the start saw her lead off the line and continue on to hold us off to the finish. The second race was much more fun, we hit the pin at the gun (and actually thought that both boats were over, so thought we would have possibly spun our circle right then around the pin going back). However, neither were called over so we followed Claire closely into the WW mark, and then fouled again on the downwind leg as we tried to gybe to starboard and she came up quickly underneath us as the leeward boat. Two penalties means an immediate circle, but you can’t spin inside the zone, so we followed her around the leeward mark and then spun our circle closely thereafter. We caught up slightly to only be about boatlength and a half back by the weather mark, but still had another penalty to try to get rid of.

As we neared the finish line, we sailed over Claire just as the breeze died from behind us and went filled from in front. We were quicker at getting our kite down and our jib up, and now as the leeward boat we had rights and when her spinnaker dropped onto our shroud we flagged, thinking we had just exonerated our penalty by her foul, and we crossed the finish line ahead. The start boat put our flag up to signal our finishing ahead just as the umpires green flagged the previous incident, unfortunately they hadn’t seen the contact of our shrouds and her kite, so we were left to recross the line and take our penalty turn, Claire winning the regatta and us all going in to celebrate. It was a long week, but we’re happy with our second place, and I’m now home, nursing the remains of my cold, which has now turned into a hoarse voice, so for those of you who are coming to St. Francis Yacht Club tonight to see Morning Light, you’ll have to excuse me using a microphone when I introduce it!

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