Miami OCR - Challenging sailing for Tunnicliffe

by Anna Tunnicliffe on 27 Jan 2012 US Sailing’s Rolex Miami OCR 2012 is currently underway on the waters of Biscayne Bay. Anna Tunnicliffe reports on the day's racing:

It was an amazingly close five-race series today (Thursday 26th January) in the quarterfinals against Team Macgregor from Great Britain. We came up short in the series losing 2-3, and failed to advance to the semi finals. Tomorrow we will participate in the fifth-eighth sail-off series and race for fifth place.

Our racing was delayed because of a boat break down that took a boat out of the rotation. We had to wait until one of the first pairs of quarterfinals finished their first-to-three matches before we could sail. Eventually we got in the boats around 2pm to start what turned into an awesome five-race series of very close racing.

Races one and two, we had a come-from-behind pass on the last leg of each race to take the win. In race three, we had an awesome start and led around the entire race course. On the last downwind leg, we were to leeward of Macgregor's team and were holding them above the layline to the pin. We called that we still had an overlap with them meaning that we could hold them passed the layline and above our proper course. But we missed the overlap actually being broken so received a penalty. Before the first penalty was signalled, we luffed again and received a second penalty immediately after and therefore, had to take our spinnaker down and do a turn immediately. It was unfortunate because we were sailing really well, and we misjudged a call that ended up costing us that race.

Race four was another close race all around the course, and as we got to the leeward mark, we had an intense gybing duel. We ended up swiping our kite across Lucy's boat in one of the gybes as I dropped the tiller. Consequently we received penalty. We caught up to them at the finish, but couldn't eek out quite enough to try to neutralize the penalty.

The fifth and final race was close up the first beat, but we were able to pull ahead by two lengths at the top mark. Downwind, we did a great job holding them off until we gybed in the wrong spot and allowed them to close the gap and get around us to round the mark ahead. Up the second beat we struggled to keep the game close enough and had a mishap with the spinnaker pole and spinnaker halyard at the top mark, allowing them to extend enough to pull off the race and thus the series win.

It was great, intense and challenging sailing so we are not quite as upset as we thought we would be. It is never fun to lose, but we sailed well and are looking forward to the sail-off tomorrow.

Sail Team Maclaren RMOCR website

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.