We were in boat preservation mode today and got a fourth. The wind was 25-30 knots from 080 max; gust 32 knots.. Quite a bit windier than any other day so far. Mains sails ragging upwind and mast snapping downwind.

We rounded the first mark first show with good speed upwind. On the run we kept our mast back and stayed away from danger in terms of not sailing too deep. This is safe but a bit slower. We lost four boats there and rounded the leeward gate. We caught up a bit upwind and rounded the top mark 4th and again were conservative downwind.

Howie Schiebler/Will Stout did a death roll just in front of us and dropped their rig about a quarter of the way down the last run. John Dane snapped his rigged behind us. It was hard to take to consciously go slow but we got around the track with no damage and another top 5 finish.

George Szabo/Mark Stube won the race and they won it downwind. One each run they sailed straight at the leeward mark, never gybed in the entire race. This is a great technique but one that I havenﾒt tried in a while do I wasnﾒt about to start practicing today.

The Schoefield brothers finished second and Andy Lovell/Magnus Liljedahl sailed fast downwind to get third. Andy and Magnus actually sailed most of the first run without the pole up. They reached as if there were a reaching mark. Then they tacked instead of gybing. This also worked well for them. Basically, it was so windy that a lot of unusual techniques were tried today. Merriman/Bennett got a nice 5th place today putting them in 6th overall.

Score wise, Szabo/Strube gained 3 points on us but Brun/Dorgan fell back with a 10th. So our lead is 12 points after 8 races; 8 races to go. After 12 races, each team gets to discard another race.

We took our rig down and inspected everything again. It seems like we are the only ones who take the rig down every night. We found that our rigging had stretched today so we reset everything. We also check all the other gear on our boat.

So we are now two races behind in the schedule. The committee is has called for three races tomorrow but our forecast is that it will be just as windy tomorrow as today.