Liz Baylis

ISAF has released the new Women’s World Match Racing Rankings and the San Francisco Women’s Match Racing Team remains the top U.S. team and holds on to the #4 spot in the World!

Claire Leroy (FRA) has a stranglehold on the #1 spot, but with two more events on our schedule for 2008 and the #2 spot less than 400 points above us, we still have the opportunity to finish the year at our highest ever ranking - #2!

To view the complete list:  http://tinyurl.com/2r8oft

Our next two events:

October 30 - November 2 : Busan Women’s Cup - Busan, South Korea
December 5-7 : Carlos Aguilar Memorial Match Race - St. Thomas, USVI

In addition to racing in the event in Korea, Molly Carapiet and I will be teaching a WIMRA clinic in Busan the week before the regatta.

Thank you for your continued support and encouragement!

Cheers,

The San Francisco Women’s Match Racing Team

(Liz, Karina, Suzy, Molly, Lee, Pease, Cory, Carol, Abby, Emily, Jenna, Sue, Shala, Dana, Alice, Hannah, and Taylor)

The quarter-finals went according to the seeding with Tulloch, SFWMRT, Tunnicliffe-Funk, and Fisher winning their pairs.  This left Tulloch to choose her Semi-final opponent and she chose JoAnn Fisher which left the SFWMRT against Tunnicliffe-Funk in the other semi-final pair.  Anna won the first match, we won the second match in a very spirited match that had a lot of exciting match racing elements (many flags, luffing, carrying past laylines, etc.).  So, it came down to the 3^rd race to decide who would go on to the finals and Anna’s team got ahead and stayed there to advance.  We faced JoAnn Fisher in the Petit-Finals which we won 2-0.  Anna went on to win the Finals 2-0 over Genny Tulloch to take the Championship.  Congratulations to Anna and her team – they sailed fast and had a great regatta.

We feel that we sailed a very good regatta and are happy with our performance.  Sure, we wish we had won, but we feel we sailed well and our match racing was improved over our recent events which made us happy.

The regatta websites have updates: http://www.rochesteryc.com/ or http://www.ussailing.org/championships/adult/women/uswmrc/

We have a few more events on our schedule this year including new events in Pusan, Korea and St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands.

Please visit our website: www.lizbaylis.com to see what else we’re up to next!

Thanks again for your continued support of our team!

Cheers,

Liz, Carol, Cory, Suzy, and Abby

The San Francisco Women’s Match Racing Team

After a delay on shore waiting for the wind to arrive and for the fog to clear, we sailed the second round robin of Stage 2.  We won three matches (Tunnicliffe-Funk, Tulloch, and Capozzi) and lost two (Fisher and Lovell).  So, we ended Stage 2 in second.  Now, on to the quarter-finals.  The pairing for the quarter-finals are:

1 Tulloch v. 8 Carapiet

2 SFWMRT v. 7 Hjorth

3 Tunnicliffe-Funk v. 6 Lovell

4 Fisher v. 5 Capozzi

The weather forecast for tomorrow is for a bit more breeze than today, so we should have some good racing for the last few rounds.

The regatta websites have updates: http://www.rochesteryc.com/ or http://www.ussailing.org/championships/adult/women/uswmrc/

More news tomorrow, but for now we are off to bed!

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, Carol, Cory, Suzy, and Abby

The San Francisco Women’s Match Racing Team

Hi,

We had another good long day on the water today.  A bit of rain punctuated the day, but didn’t dampen the racing!  We finished the remaining three flights of the initial round robin, then broke into Gold and Silver fleets for the second stage (essentially a seeding stage for the quarter-finals for the six teams in the Gold fleet and a second chance for 2 teams in the Silver fleet.)  We finished the first stage in second behind Tunnicliffe-Funk (11-0) with a score of 9 wins and 2 losses.  After the first RR of the 2^nd stage we are again in 2^nd with a score of 3 wins and 2 losses, but behind Genny Tulloch (4-1).

Results from the first stage (round robin among all competitors):

http://www.ussailing.org/championships/adult/women/uswmrc/2008/USWMRC%20Stage1%20Final.pdf

Results from the first round robin of the 2^nd Stage:

http://www.ussailing.org/championships/adult/women/uswmrc/2008/USWMRC_Stage2.pdf

The regatta websites have updates: http://www.rochesteryc.com/ or http://www.ussailing.org/championships/adult/women/uswmrc/

More news tomorrow, but for now we are off to bed!

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, Carol, Cory, Suzy, and Abby

The San Francisco Women’s Match Racing Team

We are in Rochester, NY competing in the U.S. Women’s Match Racing Championship.  Our crew for this event is Liz Baylis, Cory Sertl, Carol Cronin, and Suzy Leech with Abby Ruhlman filling in today.

 There are 12 teams competing:

Liz Baylis

Andrea Cabito

Deb Capozzi

Molly Carapiet

Killian Corbishly

JoAnn Fisher

Annie Gardner-Nelson

Liz Hjorth

Katy Lovell

Maegan Ruhlman

Genny Tulloch

Anna Tunnicliffe-Funk

 We had a long day on the water sailing eight flights of the scheduled 11 flights of the first round robin.  The regatta organizers have an ambitious schedule which will have us on the water sailing A LOT over the four days of the event.  We had a good day, winning all of our matches except for our first one against Anna Tunnicliffe-Funk.  Anna won all of her matches and is currently leading with 7 wins and no losses.  We have 7 wins and one loss.

 The results from today are posted: http://www.rochesteryc.com/files/U.S.%20Womens%20Match%20Racing%20Championship%20Stage%201%20Results.pdf

 The regatta websites have updates: http://www.rochesteryc.com/ or http://www.ussailing.org/championships/adult/women/uswmrc/

 More news tomorrow, but for now we are off to bed!

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

 A special thanks to Abby for helping us out in a bind!

 Thanks again for your continued support of our team!

 Cheers,

Liz, Carol, Cory, Suzy, and Abby

The San Francisco Women’s Match Racing Team

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

The next regatta for the San Francisco Women’s Match Racing Team is the Grade 1 Lysekil Women’s Match 2008 in Lysekil, Sweden (about 100 km north of Gothenburg on the west coast of Sweden). The regatta runs from Monday July 28^th (practice day) through Saturday August 2^nd. We will be racing the 37 foot Danish-designed match racing boats, the DS 37s, with a crew of six. For this event we have a mixture of new and old: Liz – driving; Molly Carapiet – tactician; Karina Shelton – trimming; Dana Riley – trimming; Alice Manard – trimming; and Suzy Leech on the bow. Liz, Karina, and Suzy did this same event last year. Molly is moving from the main trim position at Mayor’s Cup to become tactician. And the new comers to the team are Dana and Alice. Both are experienced sailors who have been sailing on the match racing circuit for a long time – Dana with Charlie Arms-Cartee and Alice with Katy Lovell, and we look forward to having them join us for this event.

The competition for this event is going to be tough – over half of the competitors are ranked in the top ten in the world.

Claire Leroy, FRA, Ranking: 1
Lotte Meldgaard Pedersen, DEN, Ranking: 2
Katie Spithill, AUS, Ranking: 3
Silke Hahlbrock, GER, Ranking: 4
Elizabeth Baylis, USA, Ranking: 5
Linda Rahm, SWE, Ranking: 9
Jenny Axhede, SWE, Ranking: 10
Sabrina Gurioli, ITA, Ranking: 12
Camilla Ulrikkeholm, DEN, Ranking: 14
Lucy MacGregor, GBR, Ranking: 22
Anna Kjellberg, SWE, Ranking: 23
Anne-Claire Le Berre, FRA, Ranking: 61

We are looking forward to some great sailing and fantastic competition. It should be a fun event.

So far the long-term weather forecast looks okay:
http://www.weather.com/outlook/travel/businesstraveler/tenday/SWXX0122

If you care to follow the regatta on the web: http://www.lysekilwomensmatch.se/

Many of you have made donations to the Belvedere Cove Foundation on behalf of our team – your generosity continues to help us strive to reach our goals. In addition to our support from the Belvedere Cove Foundation, for this regatta we have received a very generous grant from the San Francisco Yacht Club Board of Directors. Thank you very much, one and all, for your support.

We look forward to bringing you updates from Lysekil!

Cheers,
Liz, Molly, Karina, Dana, Alice, and Suzy
The San Francisco Women’s Match Racing Team