Shirley Robertson - part two

Even with an Olympic medal round your neck, money and crew problems are never far away.

Following on from yesterday's account of getting her campaign on the road, Shirley Robertson tells madforsailing what's next with the Yngling. Peter Bentley aks the questions.

mfs: I don’t think anybody would question the fact that in the Europe class, the technical development was vital to success. How is important do you think that is going to be in the Yngling?

SR: Very important. Everybody is doing it so you have to be part of that. The whole rig and sail design will be absolutely key to boat speed and the people who get it right will inevitably be at the top of the game.

mfs: How transferable are the skills from the Europe to the Yngling in that respect?

SR: Well the process is the same exactly the same. The way you test, the way you come to your answers; you just have to go through the process carefully and analytically

mfs: Having done a winter of graft, you are starting to accumulate knowledge and data. How do you go forward from there?

SR: That is still an ongoing process. We have a new boat coming and I think that’s quite important to us. We have sailed around in a boat that is very different to everybody else’s and it was time to get something new and shiny where everything worked. The new boat will be coming at the beginning of May.

mfs: And what about fund raising, logistics and general management issues. Where are you with those?

SR: That is one of the areas that we are trying to work on a bit harder now. The costs of keelboat sailing are phenomenal. To say that it is three times the cost of the Europe is probably underestimating it. I know it is the same in the Stars; Iain Percy is spending more and more. Also the way that the Lottery funding works there is just not enough money to fund a keelboat. When Iain and I sailed dinghies it covered much higher percentages of what the whole thing was going to cost.

mfs: And does that cause you to take your eye off the ball and look at other things?

SR: While this is an issue for us, it is just another area of preparation that you have to do. In a way you have always got to do it. We are kind of running on credit for a while but it is much scarier in the Yngling because while in the Europe it was only a couple of grand now it is much bigger numbers so credit is much harder to manage. It is a lot, lot scarier.


Shirley in her Europe in 1991