It's really too bad that there are no pictures of our battle with Tommy on the final run, which turned out to be a real classic. Rounding onto the run about five lengths ahead, Tommy again went a bit high of the rhumbline on starboard, which allowed Marc and me to assume our favourite attacking position: to leeward and astern. We could have sat dead between Tommy and the wind and hoped to pass him that way, but first, we'd still have to get within two boatlengths before we could hope to start taking his wind. And that might have worked, but we chose to purely boat speed test instead. Strategically, we were aiming to get close enough to make Tommy worried about gybing onto port in case he could no longer cross without fouling. And we managed to gain just enough, that about 3/4 down the leg, it became evident that if Marc and I held our course, we could block Tommy from gybing until we chose to let him, which would be when we were well past the lay line to the finish mark. However, Tommy was far enough to windward that he could still gybe and luff up to pass astern of us. Which he did, as the lesser of the two evils since this at least gave him some promising options, whereas by holding starboard until we were good and ready to let him gybe, he would be virtually certain to lose. We now had a very brief, two-second discussion aboard SHADES: Marc wanted us to gybe and go with Tommy, but, with only 200 yards to go to the finish and no buoy room considerations to worry about, I wanted to hold my course which at the time was pointing us perhaps five lengths to the "wrong" side of the RC boat at the right-hand end of the line which looked square to me, or perhaps even a touch boat-end favoured. This way, we could go with our strength, namely our speed which had been at least equal to Tommy's thus far. So, with only a minor mutter from my crew as tweaked the spinnaker yet again to get the absolute most out of it, I chose to keep going and simply concentrate and doing as much surfing as possible. The other bonus about this approach was that as long as Tommy held port and each of us was sailing a few degrees high of dead downwind, we were gaining separation. The last thing I wanted was to have Tommy right astern where he could blanket us. The other thing Tommy could have done was to gybe back to starboard just to leeward and astern, and thus do to us what we had done to him, i.e. block us from gybing to port to get to the line until he was good and ready to go. But that didn't happen, and we duly ...