In fact, the three New Zealand sailors in the fleet have no complaints after the first of two round-robins leading to Saturday's championship sailoffs. Brady, rolling with eight consecutive wins after an opening loss, leads the Kiwi clan at 8-1, followed by local resident Scott Dickson (6-3) alone in second place and Simon Minoprio in a three-way tie for third at 5-4.
But Brady's win against Antoine-Pierre Morvan wasn't pretty. In the pre-start sequence he rammed the Frenchman's transom and his spinnaker pole hooked onto the rival's luff line, leaving the boats temporarily inseparable. Brady drew a penalty, but built enough of a lead to erase it with a turn at the end of the race.
It was a lively day with unusually strong southeast winds of 15 knots that shifted 60 degrees right and faded to 6 in mid-afternoon---the opposite pattern of normal Long Beach sea breezes.
Dickson, the leader coming in at 5-0, lost three of his four races, although he was in position to win two of them. Dickson saved a lead when Morvan carried him a couple of hundred yards past the windward mark, but then lost it, and the race, when he momentarily lost control while leading Morvan downwind.
