So Neil, it has been nearly a week since your win. Has that been enough time to recover from your hangover?
"Well on the Saturday morning I felt quite refreshed, a slight hangover but nothing too drastic. It was a damn good night, that Friday night, and I hope it was good for everybody else."

I must ask you about that. The Champagne and the dancing, did you have it all planned?
"It's funny, I have always been a spur of the moment type of person, and I was always dreading the prize-giving. Deep down I have always liked a bit of showmanship at prize-givings, but that was very much spur of the moment. It wasn't planned."

You have won World Championships in other classes before, namely The Enterprise and Topper, but never the GP. How does this win compare with the others?
"I approached my other two wins from a slightly different angle. Going back to the Enterprises in 1987, we approached the event more from a boatspeed point of view. We were the quickest boat on the water and we were the fittest guys on the water, so we ended up being the quickest, if not the most technically minded. In the Toppers I was also the fittest person there, and close to being the quickest on the water.
On this occasion I knew deep down that we would have boatspeed issues in certain wind conditions, and that I would have to approach the event more from a technical, tactical point of view, and live with the boatspeed problems at times. All my preparation for the event was based on tactics."

You have been trying to win the GP Worlds for over 20 years.
"I always say I have a love/hate relationship with the boat. I wouldn't say the GP is my ideal boat, it's a heavy boat and I'm a light person, so it doesn't always suit my style of sailing. It is the boat we have always sailed in my family and that my parents first bought though, so it is a natural choice. At some point I felt I had to win the GP Worlds."

What was your preparation for this event and how did you rate your chances before the start?
"I can look back and say my pre-event preparation could have been better. I have got years on my side though, and I knew what kind of performance my boat and crew were going to give me. I would have liked to have done more sailing with Derek, but what with jobs and sailing the 470, the chances were limited. There were opportunities to sail at GP events, but I chose not to take them, perhaps to not lay my cards on the table. I chose to focus purely on the championship, and sail away from the GP circuit. It may have worked or it may have not, but I think it did."

Did you think this championship would test any particular aspect of your sailing more than others?
"With an entry of 170 boats forecast, I knew that this might produce situations which would test certain aspects of big fleet sailing, but I felt confident about this. It was like going back to the 70s, where we had Mirror fleets of over 200 boats, and early GP events like when we had 190 boats at Mumbles. With my experience, it never uneased me having this many boats on the water, and I think this may have worked in my favour, because the boatspeed element becomes less a part of the winning strategy, and the tactics become more of it.
I knew that we would struggle in the higher wind speeds, because we sailed this championships the lightest we have ever sailed a GP. Normally Derek and I are about 22 to 22 ½ stone, but on this occasion I had lost a bit of weight to helm the 470, which brought me down to 60Kg, and Derek had been walking in Iceland and had lost half a stone to drop down to 11 ½ stone, so we were sailing at under 21 ½ stone, so we knew we were always going to struggle in a breeze.

Were you expecting a light airs event then?
"I won my first Enterprise nationals at Abersoch, and on that occasion it was a mostly light week, but I have also sailed a Fireball nationals there, and it blew every single day. I would normally expect Abersoch to lighter than it was this week, but I was willing to take whatever was thrown at us. I never went there hoping it would be light airs, I think if you do that, you've lost already.

Talk us through the first day. Richard scored a 2,1 and you got a 3 and a 31st. What happened there?
"In the first race we got a 3rd, and that was a good result for us. If we could get one result in the single figures out of the day, then I would be happy, because it meant we could move on and go forwards. The third then, I was dead chuffed with. It could easily have been a first, so it gave us a lot of confidence that we could sail well.
My race strategy in the first race was quite different to the others, I remember it quite clearly. We started late, which is a hard plan to go for seeing as most good sailors wanted to come out early. I opted for a late start, which is a high risk strategy, but I felt late was going to pay, and I stuck to my game plan. I thought if we come out early and we haven't got the boatspeed, then we are going to be buried, but if I can be tactically more aware than the rest of the fleet, then I can get up in the single figures and hang on to a good result.
Late did pay, and the pathfinder and I rounded first and second, but Richard Estaugh came ploughing through the fleet and finished second and we were third, but c'est la vie!"

"In the next race the tide had turned, and we decided that early was going to pay on this occasion, so we popped out early. It was looking really good for a while, but for one reason or another we had a lapse of concentration, communications broke down in the boat and we ended up overstanding the mark and came in about 60th at the windward mark, so it was a bad race. It was one that I was gutted about, because you can't afford to do that at this level and I was very upset at the outcome of that race.
Later that evening though, we re-focused and decided that we had the third, and could go forwards from there, and that tomorrow was another day and we were still in the championships."

Did you still think you could win the event on Monday night?
"Oh yes. Until it is mathematically impossible to win, then you keep going. Carrying the third over from the first day, then it wasn't too bad. If that third had been say a fifteenth instead, then it would have been a different matter."

Tuesday saw probably the lightest winds of the week. Presumably this suited you and Derek.
"As we left the shore in a force two, this gave me a lot of confidence. I suspected we would be quite quick in these conditions, but at the end of the day we had done no tuning because I had kept myself to myself in the build-up to the event. I felt that if we were going to perform, then it would be in wind strengths of around force 2. On that day, we were the only boat sailing around the course fully hiked out and powered up, and I could look over my shoulder and see people sat in. There was a steep little chop on the water and we were piling quickly through this."

During the training weekend you said that you would normally be starting early, in the first twenty boats, but in Tuesday's first race you started very late and won the race. What was the reason behind this decision, especially with so much light air speed?
"This decision was based purely on tide. All my starting tactics were based purely on tide in the early part of the week."

As we all know, Wednesday's racing was abandoned due to a lack of wind. Do you think Wednesday should have been a lay day anyway?
"No. I'm not a big fan of lay days. A World Championship with lay days is not something I would probably want to be a part of. There's nothing worse than sitting on the beach whilst there's a nice force 4 blowing, then the next day ending up with no wind. I would be gutted if this happened, especially as we all put so much effort into the week. I had a lay day on the Saturday after the prize-giving, sitting on the balcony of the yacht club in the sunshine, drinking a diet coke. That was my lay day!

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