Sitting down with Will Harris

Shirley Robertson

In this episode of Shirley Robertson’s Sailing Podcast, the double Olympic gold medalist and host Shirley Robertson talks to British offshore sailor Will Harris to discuss all things offshore, IMOCA sailing, and his career to date.

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 days 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,” said Harris. “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.”

Will Harris

From there Will’s reputation steadily grew, and now, at just 31 years of age, he is widely regarded as one of offshore sailings 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 shorthanded, 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.”

The pair discuss the development of the IMOCA Class as the offshore yacht of choice for The Ocean Race as Will shares his thoughts on sailing the performance driven foiling monohulls offshore both crewed and solo.

He went on to dissect Team Malizia’s performance in the 2023 edition of The Ocean Race, an edition which saw them take two Leg wins and set an unofficial 24 Hour Monohull Speed record with an average speed over 24 hours of 26.7knots over a distance of 641.13 nautical miles! Will’s recollections of the race also take in the harrowing mid-ocean repairs to the mast, as well as an emotional realization on the final leg of the Race…:

“For some reason (the map) highlighted Surrey on the navigation map and it was a mind blowing moment for me, I’d looked at that map all the way around the world, I’d seen the Southern Ocean, I’d seen Cape Horn, I’d seen Cape Town…all these places in the world and suddenly I was looking at my home town where I grew up for fifteen years….and that was when it hit home to me ‘we’ve just sailed around the world’ in less than six months and now I’m less than fifty miles from where I first dreamed of doing this.”

Part One:

Part Two:

Shirley Robertson OBE made history by becoming the first British woman to win Olympic Gold Medals at two consecutive Olympic Games. Shirley Robertson’s Sailing Podcast, produced and edited by Tim Butt of Vertigo Films, is available via most popular podcast outlets, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcast, and aCast.