Liz Baylis

The Knickerbocker Cup ended earlier for our team than we would have liked on Saturday. We had an up and down day on Saturday with our remaining 5 matches. We had good moments and bad moments – some decent starts and some not as good ones, some moments of brilliance around the course, but the net outcome was five more losses. To say the least, this is not exactly how we wanted this event to go! We took away a few hard learned lessons that we will use to step up our game for our future events.

All of the teams at this event and especially the four teams that moved onto Sunday’s semi-finals are very strong and are all names you’ll be seeing on the open match racing circuit in the years to come. We look forward to the opportunity to test ourselves with them again with hopefully better results for us.

We’d like to thank our hosts, Jeanne Rosenthal (KYC Rear Commodore) and Perry Lengton, for putting us up in their home in Port Washington during the event. They made us feel very welcome.

The next event on our schedule is defending our title at the U.S. Women’s Match Racing Championship in Rochester, NY September 6-10. The SFWMRT crew will be Liz Baylis, Cory Sertl, Carol Cronin, and Suzy Leech. Other SFWMRT team members will also be competing: Molly Carapiet will be skippering with Emily Hill crewing. And Alice Manard will be sailing with Katy Lovell. The event should be very competitive with, among other, Olympians Anna Tunnicliffe and Deb Capozzi also skippering.

Look for updates before that event begins in a few weeks.

In the meantime, please visit our website: www.lizbaylis.com to see what else we’re up to.

Thanks again for your continued support of our team!

Cheers,
Liz, Molly, Suzy, Emily, and Jenna
The San Francisco Women’s Match Racing Team

We finally got to go racing today! We went out at around 9:30 and towed about three miles out to Long Island Sound and discovered a light Northeasterly breeze to race in. We had a mixture of good starts and not so good starts and good races and not so good races, but didn’t string together a good winning combination of our first five matches. The highlight of our early matches might have been beating the highly ranked Russians, Arbuzov, at the start and getting a penalty on them, but they had better boatspeed than us and were able to pull out the win. So we were 0-5 in our first batches of races, then after a break until around 7 P.M. (while the other group sailed) we came out with a renewed vigor and beat the Argentinians off the start and led wire to wire which was a nice way to sail into the sunset today.

Tomorrow morning we are first up for five more matches and will be taking the lessons learned today into those matches and will hopefully have a better scorecard than today.

The regatta website: http://www.kyc.net/cup.asp

The local weather: http://tinyurl.com/6m5jgz

Our website: www.lizbaylis.com

Check back in tomorrow for another update!

Cheers,
Liz, Molly, Suzy, Emily, and Jenna
The San Francisco Women’s Match Racing Team

We’re tied for first after the first day of the Knickerbocker Cup!  But, the problem is that we’re also tied for last.  We experienced a typical Long Island day in August – beautiful sunshine and a decided lack of wind.  Since there are 12 teams and six boats, half of the teams stayed ashore while the other six headed out to race.  We were scheduled to sail the first five flights then sit out for five flights, so we were up for our first match this morning against the Japanese team, Nakamura.  We started in about 2 knots of breeze and the wind died from there.  After the first painful lap the race committee abandoned the race and we drifted around for a few hours before they sent us ashore to wait for a few hours then they sent us out on the water again for a few more hours of waiting before we came in for dinner.  So, everyone has the same scorecard after the first day – 0-0.

Hopefully we’ll have some breeze tomorrow!

The regatta website: http://www.kyc.net/cup.asp

The local weather: http://tinyurl.com/6m5jgz

Our website: www.lizbaylis.com

Check back in tomorrow for another update!

Cheers,

Liz, Molly, Suzy, Emily, and Jenna

The San Francisco Women’s Match Racing Team

The San Francisco Women’s Match Racing team is ready to hit the water again. This week we will be competing in our first Open Grade 2 event, the 2008 Knickerbocker Cup in Port Washington, New York. (For those not privy to the lingo, there are two types of match racing events: women’s events and open events. The open circuit is sometimes known as the men’s circuit, so we’re going out and playing with the boys this week!)

Our team has some familiar faces and a couple of new faces this week: Liz Baylis, driver; Molly Carapiet, tactician/main trimmer; Suzy Leech, bow; Emily Hill, trimmer; and Jenna Hansen, trimmer. The new team members: Emily joins us from Molly’s match racing team as well as experience on the team racing circuit and racing Laser Radials. Jenna comes from Sam Osborne’s successful Kiwi match racing team and is in the States doing a semester studying abroad in Virginia this coming fall.

From the Knickerbocker Cup Press Release:

“In addition to last years Cup winner Chris Van Tol (USA) who is returning to defend his title, the contenders will include top-ranked Andrey Arbuzov (RUS), followed by Keith Swinton (AUS), Sergey Muskihiin (RUS) Evan Walker (AUS), Juan Ignacio Grimaldi (ARG), Phil Robertson (NZL), Takumi Nakamura (JPN), Robbie Allam (GBR), Francesco Bruni (ITA), and a female skipper: Elizabeth Baylis (USA). Ms. Baylis recently took first place in the Mayor’s Cup in Long Beach, USA.”

Today we will practice in the afternoon, then have our meeting with the umpires, followed by the opening ceremonies tonight.

Tomorrow the regatta starts and continues through Sunday.

The regatta website: http://www.kyc.net/cup.asp
The local weather: http://tinyurl.com/6m5jgz
Our website: www.lizbaylis.com

We’ll have daily updates over the next few days.

Cheers,
Liz, Molly, Suzy, Emily, and Jenna
The San Francisco Women’s Match Racing Team