Another good day for Mary, Kate and I today as we won 3 out of 4 races to earn our place in the gold fleet and quarter finals. It was another tricky day with close races throughout but an improvement on yesterday was that we were giving our opponents penalties rather than receiving them ourselves!

The first round is so critical for us with the format we race with because only the top two teams from each of the three groups are guaranteed a place in the gold fleet (the seeding round for the quarter finals). This means that every race counts and even with just one loss you can still miss the cut. In our group going into the final race, if we won we would be through to the gold fleet and if we lost we would be in the repechage so the pressure was on for our race against Anna Tunnicliffe. It was not a good start for us but we were ahead round the first mark and still ahead - just with Tunnicliffe having a penalty round the leeward mark. Racing remained extremely close up the second beat but we remained ahead until the top of the final run where after being rolled, we were behind but with the Americans still having to do a penalty. When Tunnicliffe dropped her spinnaker in the bottom third of the beat it was time for us to make a choice, match her and drop too or use our positioning to be able to roll her with our kite still up. Option two it was and after a shaky gybe at first, we rolled them straight away however still were being luffed - something the Y flagged solved and we crossed the finish line ahead and with Tunnicliffe having two penalties....it got the heart rate up a little ;).

Tomorrow we will sail the first three of our gold fleet races in the middle of the day aftre the repecharge group. Keep updated at the event website http://rmocr.ussailing.org/.

Lucy x

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