Silver Sails reports from Rolex Miami OCR Match Racing

by Silver Sails Media on 27 Jan 2010
The New Zealand Women’s Match-Racing crew skippered by Samantha Osborne with Jenna Hansen and Raynor Smeal is in Florida for the 2010 Rolex Miami OCR (Olympic Classes Regatta).

Here the report on their first few days of the regatta.

Arrival in Miami:

Hello to all,

WOW; we are here, in Miami and ready for racing......

Registration, weigh in and all the admin was pretty smooth and was over and done with early this morning.

This afternoon we were treated to some Miami breeze, a solid 20 knots.

We refined the boat handling and finished the day with a line up with the Russians.

Lessons from the last 4 days of training have been learnt and stored for racing which commences tomorrow.

We've had a bit of drama, our coach boat sprung a leak and we are down a boat for Rod.
However, Rod enlightened us with his unusal but beneficial skills of walking on water.

That aside, the Aussies helped us out and let us use their boat during training today...... (we were in different sessions)... thanks mate!

We've got a few plans of attack for tomorrow, so all will be fine. However whether Rod will be hanging out in the elements or enjoying some marine luxury will all be determined tomorrow.

The official format of the regatta is:

24 teams are being split into 3 pools of 8 sailors. (allocation dependent on ISAF MR ranking)

Each pool will have a round robin. (total of 7 races)

The top 2 from each pool advance to gold fleet

3rdand 4thgo to the repe-charge (top two go through to gold fleet)

4th– 8th go to silver fleet.

Once the gold fleet has been determined quarters/semis and then finals will continue.

We are in Pool C and have 4 races scheduled for Monday (NZ time = Tues)

Thank you to everyone that has helped us prepare for Miami:

Thank you to our fellow NZ Squad members, our coaches Rod, Graeme & Laurie, RNZYS Lion Foundation Youth Training Programme and all the guys that given up their time to come racing against us during our build up in NZ.

Thank you to RNZYS, Yachting NZ and SPARC for helping us get here and assisting us whilst in Miami! We appreciate all of your support, cheers!

The sailors are ready, the fridge is full and bring on tomorrow!

Silver Sails Racing
(Samantha Osborne, Jenna Hansen & Raynor Smeal)

Day 1:

Hello everyone,

We had 4 races scheduled for today, however due to an afternoon storm, racing for pool c was postponed.
Pool A had 3 races and Pool B had 4 races.

We went out to watch the racing in Pool B with the american coach.....

The plan for tomorrow is to get all of pool c's round robin complete - a total of seven races.

For a live update of results, please refer to the regatta website -> http://rmocr.ussailing.org/
Our team website is -> www.silversailsracing.com

Cheers,

Silver Sails Racing
Samantha Osborne, Jenna Hansen and Raynor Smeal


Day 2:

Hello from Miami,

This morning we were greeted to cooler temperatures and a bit of breeze.
The day cleared up and we had 7-15 knots with lots of chop out in the bay.

Pool C (us) raced all morning and into the early afternoon to finish the round robin.

We had an awesome start, with three clean wins.

Then came the race with Archer (GBR), where we started over and slow and we could just never catch up.
Next was Souter (AUS), it was a close tight race, we both had our opportunities and she took hers to win the race.

In Silver Sails Racing style, the team fought hard, and finished off with two wins. So we ended up with 5 wins, 2 losses and 2nd in the round robin.

This result guarantees us a place in the quarter finals (top 8) on Friday.

Pool B also finished their round robin today with Lucy McGregor (GBR) and Sally Barkow (USA) qualifying for the quarters also.

The highlight of the day was literally making it through....... we are stoked and looking forward to the next round.

In the mean time, Pool A will finish up tomorrow along with the repecharge for the final 2 places for the quarter finals.

Then the top 6 (top 2 from each pool) will have a round robin which will determine our seeds for the quarters.

We are really looking forward to racing these girls - at this stage we have three races scheduled for tomorrow.

An update with the coach boat situation, all is fine, Rod has been out on the water. We appreciate his support and assistance.....it has been oh so helpful.

In other news, we went for an outing to the light house and a swim at the beach.
It was nice to just chill and switch off for a few hours.

We will sleep well tonight and will start clean again tomorrow.

We appreciate the support from Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron, Yachting New Zealand, SPARC and SLAM.

Thank you for the emails, texts and support.......


Silver Sails Racing
(Samantha Osborne, Jenna Hansen & Raynor Smeal)