“It’s been against all our expectations,” Tulloch said after the first day of racing. “We were ready for something else.”

Harvard coach Mike O’Connor attributed the Crimson’s struggles to “the fact that we’re still in finals, we had to fly here late, we’re pretty tired, and we weren’t quite on our game.”

“Yesterday [with] the conditions here in the gorge,” he added, “the thing we’re not used to is the current.”

That would all change.

Behind several late, strong performances—especially by B Division entries Sloan Devlin and Mallory Greimann—the Crimson swelled into sixth place on the second day of competition, then second place on the third and final day. Devlin would go on to be recognized as an All-American.

Neither the sharp current nor the lack of wind changed—but women’s sailing’s fortunes did.

Only Yale, which finished first with 154 points, held off the Crimson’s late charge. Harvard finished Nationals with 175 points.

—Staff writer Alex McPhillips can be reached at rmcphill@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Pablo S. Torre can be reached at torre@fas.harvard.edu.