HENLEY-ON-THAMES, England – Rutgers and the University of Washington won semifinal races Saturday, setting up an all-American final for the Ladies’ Plate at the Henley Royal Regatta.

Two other American teams reached Sunday’s final. Jason Read and Bryan Volpenhein will face British Olympic stars Matthew Pinsent and James Cracknell in the Silver Goblets, and Malvern Preparatory School from suburban Philadelphia will race in the Fawley Cup.

Rutgers, competing in the regatta for the first time, beat England’s Leander by 11/2 lengths, and Washington topped England’s Molesey and Imperial College by one-quarter of a length.

“That was pretty challenging,” said Washington coach Bob Ernst. “We expected the very best from Molesey, and that’s what we got.”

Princeton’s “A” crew beat a Dutch crew, Nereus, Amsterdam, by 21/2 lengths to set up the other all-American final. Later, Princeton’s “B” crew defeated defending champion Harvard by 1 1/4 lengths in the student eights.

Read and Volpenhein, of New Jersey’s Princeton Training Center, won their semifinal for international coxless pairs, beating Sinisa and Niksa Skelin of Croatia.

The Skelin brothers beat world champions Cracknell and Pinsent earlier this season.

Malvern beat Australia’s Sydney Rowing Club by two lengths in the semifinals of the schoolboy quadruple-scullers competition, after defeating German squad Hamburger and Germania in the quarterfinals.

Harvard lost to Cambridge University by three lengths in the semifinals of the Visitors’ Cup for student coxless fours.

Harvard protested their opponents’ steering, but the result was upheld.

Noble and Greenough School from Dedham, Mass., lost by half a length to St. Edward’s School from England in the Princess Elizabeth Cup for schoolboy eights. Earlier, Belmont Hill School of Belmont, Mass., lost to British school champion Pangbourne College by two-thirds of a length.

Red sores found on big fish in Michigan

DETROIT – They call it muskie pox. It showed up in Lake St. Clair as red sores on muskellunge last year, and this spring anglers reported seeing hundreds of big muskies floating dead in the Detroit River, apparently killed by the disease.

A similar disease, P. salmonis, was first seen in farm-reared salmon in Chile in 1989 and identified in 1992. It has caused enormous losses on Pacific and Atlantic salmon farms in South America, Europe and Canada. But biologist Mike Thomas said the Lake St. Clair muskie outbreak “is the first that it has been seen in wild fish.”

“We don’t know much about it yet,” said Thomas, a researcher at the state Department of Natural Resources’ Lake St. Clair laboratory in Macomb County. “We know that in salmon it’s caused by a bacterium called Piscirickettsia salmonis, and we found a very similar organism in dead muskellunge from Lake St. Clair.”

The disease is not known to affect people, but it poses enough of a threat to the muskellunge population that Thomas has launched a study. He is encouraging anglers to bring live large muskellunge to research vessels on Lake St. Clair this summer and fall so biologists can try to determine how many fish are infected.

and how the disease spreads.