This weekend, the No. 1 Harvard co-ed sailing team planned a few tacks ahead.

The Crimson managed a middling finish in a competitive intersectional but qualified for next year’s New England Sloop Championship with a win in the New England Sloop Series 3 on Sunday.

Manning the sloop regatta necessitated pulling Harvard’s two most capable skippers from the middle of team racing, but the exigencies of qualifying for the sloop championship offset a substandard overall showing in team racing with mere weeks before New England Team Race Championships.

NEW ENGLAND SLOOP SERIES 3

Steady breezes filled the sails of the four-handed 44-class sloops as the Crimson won four of eight races in the single-day qualifier, held Sunday at the US Coast Guard Academy.

Junior captain Vincent Porter and sophomores Clay Johnson, Matt Knowles, and Robby McIntosh carried Harvard to the four wins and the overall victory.

Dartmouth posed the most tangible threat to the Crimson’s win, taking two races and posting three second-place finishes to tally 21 points to Harvard’s 18.

FERRARO TROPHY

The Crimson bought its success at the Coast Guard Academy by sacrificing the team’s results against a stacked field at the Ferraro Trophy Team Racing Intersectional, held Saturday and Sunday at Yale.

Harvard finished second of 11 teams in the first day of racing, but it then sent top team-racing skippers Porter and Johnson to Coast Guard for the sloops qualifier.

The team finished 5-4 overall, but only finishes within the top bracket of racing counted, leaving the Crimson with a 3-4 record for scoring purposes. Yale tied Dartmouth for first place, but the Bulldogs won based on head-to-head results.

In Saturday’s racing, Harvard had lost only to Yale to take second at day’s end.

“We were sailing our A-team for New Englands [on Saturday], and we did really well,” junior captain Sloan Devlin said.

The Crimson kept freshman skipper Kyle Kovacs from Saturday and added Devlin and senior Genny Tulloch for Sunday. Senior Laura Schubert and sophomores Emily Simon and Christina Dahlman crewed both days.

“We kind of got our butts kicked on Sunday,” Tulloch said. “We went into the weekend knowing that we weren’t going to do that well again not having them there on Sunday.”