Know your team
A little past halfway up the beat, we'd finally earned our freedom. In fact, at one point a little later we would be the right-hand boat, though still not far from the center of the track. When a right shift began to phase in, we tacked to starboard with the Yacht Club Italiano team ahead and just barely to leeward. On the surface it looks like a marginal lane, but the YCI boat protected us from any of the boats coming across on port tacking into a leebow position. This was our passing lane, and we needed to protect it at all costs. At this stage, we were enough back in the game that we needed to think about using other boats to protect us. I was very comfortable that Phil Lotz [helmsman] and Rick Merriman [main trimmer] could hold a thin lane. Some people, when sailing in such a lane, get sucked in by the leeward boat. I knew Phil and Rick could, if needed, go two-tenths below target speed and hold a thin lane. That's a huge comfort factor for a tactician.

Maintain an escape route
The racecourse was closing down as we approached the top mark, and if anything it was getting shiftier as we neared the lee shore of Conanicut Island. We'd worked hard to get some freedom on the right side; I wanted to make sure we kept our options open for the final quarter of the beat. It's really nice in these situations to look onto your windward hip and not see a boat blocking a potential clearing tack.

Don't lose sight of the big picture
This was the ninth race in an 11-race series; we were winning the regatta by a few points. The worst thing we could do was foul someone. Additionally, that pack on the left was still there. I said to myself, "There's no way that [left side] doesn't turn into a massive dogfight." So I played the last two tacks fairly conservatively. We overstood the layline by a couple lengths just in case there was one last left shift before the mark, and because of some right-to-left current. The majority of the fleet approached from the left, each boat was forced to tack and lee bow another boat on starboard tack on a very thin layline. Sure enough, the pack got really slow and we rolled over the top, rounding in sixth place, with a nice cushion behind us and a few boats ahead very much within striking distance. A huge comeback from a last-place start.

Press your luck
In a good fleet, a comeback like that doesn't happen without a little bit of good fortune. Twice boats tacked on us and pushed us into favorable shifts. We rounded the mark thinking: "That was a really cool leg, and a bit of a miracle."

But I was still looking ahead. I was wondering how we could get into third by the bottom mark. On days like this, you might get five reasonable shifts to work with on a beat. But on the run, because you're going with the breeze, you might see one or two. There's less room for error going downwind.

As it turned out, we played the run right, jumped into third, and almost cracked the top two by the finish. The Canadian boat, which tacked on top of us halfway up the beat, got stuck in the maelstrom at the mark and had to claw back to eighth. That pushed our lead out to 13 points with two races remaining, which proved more than enough for us to hold on for a regatta win.