This month Shirley Robertson's Sailing Podcast hosts talented British offshore sailor Will Harris, as the acclaimed offshore professional joins Double Olympic gold medallist Shirley Robertson to discuss all things offshore, IMOCA sailing and his career to date.

In this Part 1, the duo get things underway with a brief reflection on Will's podium place finish in the recent 2025 Transat Café L'Or, which saw him sail to a second place finish sailed with 11th Hour Racing's Frankie Clapcich. From there the pair go to back to discuss the early day's of Will's sailing life, growing up in the landlocked southern UK county of Surrey before studying Oceanography at Southampton University. Will's successful application into the then flourishing Artemis Offshore Sailing Academy ultimately allowed entry into the legendary French Solitaire du Figaro scene, and a 2016 Rookie of the Year award...:

"The cool thing with the Figaro is that....because you're solo on the boat you have to be good at everything on it, you have to be good at trimming it, you have to be good at living on the boat, you have to be good at the navigation, and because the level is so high you really have to get into the details on everything, so I think from one year of Figaro sailing you can learn so much more than someone who's done five years on any sort of other race course."

From there Will's reputation steadily grew, and now, at just 31 years of age, he is widely regarded as one of offshore sailings bright rising stars, a lap of the planet with Boris Herrmann's Team Malizia in 2023 in The Ocean Race cementing Will's place in the upper echelon of the sport. Over the past decade, Will's emergence in the IMOCA sailing scene has been concurrent with the move, within the IMOCA fleet, to high performance offshore foiling, a development that Will has been quick to embrace as one of the fleet's key proponents of data driven high performance offshore navigating...:

"When you're solo and short handed you have to add in this human aspect of 'OK, the routing tells me to do fifteen sail changes in the next twenty four hours, that's just not realistic and it's not fast' so you have got to take that data, and what the computer and analytics is telling you to do and you've got to add that human aspect of 'OK, what's really realistic and what does my gut tell me to do and what does my experience say is going to be the best thing to actually do.' rather than just going what the computer says."

This first part ends just as Will is about to take on the 2023 Ocean Race as co-skipper on board Boris Herrmann's "Team Malizia", a story which continues in Part 2.

This edition of the podcast is in two parts and is available to listen to via the podcast page of Shirley’s own website - www.shirleyrobertson.com/podcast or via most popular podcast outlets, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcast and aCast. The podcast is produced and written by Tim Butt - for further enquires, please contact podcast@shirleyrobertson.com.

Support the show