US Sailing Team member Anna Tunnicliffe reports:

The first of four days of racing at the U.S. Women's Match Racing Championship got under way today at the Bayview Yacht Club in light conditions with Debbie Capozzi from Long Island’s Sayville YC on hand to defend the championship she and her crew won last year.

We are racing in three-person Ultimate 20 trailer boats. These high-performance 21-footers are very lively and responsive and my crew and I spent an intense hour and a half yesterday getting a feel for the boat and learning the best way to trim sails and handle the spinnaker. I have a great crew in Ali Sharp and Liz Bower, although Liz is sailing under a bit of a handicap. She broke her thumb a week ago and her arm is in a cast. She’s done a super job despite this and I know she’ll tough it out.

There are 11 top-notch teams racing here but only six boats, so the volunteers from Bayview have been rotating the crews through the boats for the opening round. That meant our crew sat around most of the day and didn’t get onto the water until 4:30 PM but that’s OK. It made it a little tough to maintain focus but I got plenty of practice in sitting still and waiting while I was in Qingdao, China.

We only completed two races but we won both of them which leaves us with a perfect, if rather small score. The only other skipper with no losses is last year’s runner-up, Katy Lovell, from Southern YC in New Orleans, La., with a 5-0 score.

Debbie, the US Yngling sailor who was with me in Qingdao for the Pre-Olympic Regatta, and Charlie Arms from Vellejo, Calif., both have 3-1 scores.

We started our race against Kathy Lundeen just before 5:00 PM. This was our first race, with no warmup, and it was her eighth, but we quickly slipped into a good boat-handling routine. We made a perfectly-timed port tack entry before I made a bone-head move that, even as I began it, I knew was dumb. We copped a penalty flag before the start gun but we pinned Kathy at the start line to lead at the weather mark where she made a bad spinnaker set, giving us the room to make our penalty turn before the finish. Against Elizabeth Hjorth, we led all the way. The closest she got to us was two boat lengths to leeward off the line. From there, we extended all the way.

Tomorrow the forecast calls for breeze at 15-20 knots and rain, so it should make for plenty of racing and some good action.