Consistency was the winning formula for Colleen Cooke and her team from Point Loma’s Southwestern Yacht Club on Oct. 17 in winning the 2010 Linda Elias Memorial Women’s One-Design Challenge, sponsored by the Long Beach/Los Angeles Women’s Sailing Association and hosted by Long Beach Yacht Club. Leading by nine points after the Oct. 16 races, Cooke and her team focused not on who they had to beat the next day but on keeping mistakes to a minimum. “I have a lot of confidence in the team,” Cooke said, “and I had a lot of confidence coming to the event because of the team. We work well together but knew that even with our lead at the end of the first day we still had a long way to go.” In 2008, Cooke and her team also held the lead at the end of the first day, but lost the lead and the event by the end of the second day. “Today [Oct, 17] we went out very early to practice,” Cooke said, “keeping our focus from yesterday. The first race we got a good start away from the pin end where there was a lot going on. In the next race, we wanted to stay clean so I told my bow person to keep us from going over early. But it was the age-old problem of being too conservative and we didn’t do too well [finishing eighth]. “We recognized that we couldn’t do that for the third race, so we were more aggressive, winning the pin and finishing near the top [third],” she said. This is a terrific team with lots of talent and we have an excellent tactician in Kris Zillmann. She was rock solid.” Members of the Newport Harbor Yacht Club were second in the regatta, while third place was claimed by Julie Mitchell and the team from Point Loma’s San Diego Yacht Club. Fourth place went to Team Pilikia from Orange County. The Women’s One-Design event began 19 years ago and Linda Elias — the namesake for the current regatta — won the championship three of the first five years. Elias passed away in 2003 and the Long Beach/Los Angeles Women’s Sailing Association rededicated the event to her memory.