THE final day of World Cup racing for the Paralympic classes in Miami saw two silver medals for Britain’s sailors.

Just two weeks after reaching the podium at their World Championships in Port Charlotte, Florida, Skandia Team GBR’s world title-winning SKUD duo of Alexandra Rickham and Niki Birrell and the Sonar team of John Robertson, Hannah Stodel and Steve Thomas ensured they continued their medal-winning ways in 2012.

Portland’s Rickham and Birrell missed out on gold at this Rolex Miami OCR – the second leg of the World Cup series – by just one point to the Australian duo of Daniel Fitzgibbon and Liesl Tesch, but helm Rickham insists they were happy with their performance at a venue which has proved tough for them in the past.

She said: “We’re happy with everything – this is pretty much the worst venue for us! We seem to suffer here every year so to come away with a silver is quite a big step forwards.

“We just missed out on the gold, normally we’re fighting just to get the bronze so we leave here really confident and happy with our winter’s work.

“We’ve had a really long, tough winter working extremely hard and going to more events than most people, and I think it’s paid off and it’s showing that that work’s been good.”

“We’ve learnt tons and at the Worlds as well – it was a much closer Worlds for us than it has been in the last few years, so I think all in all it’s more about what we’ve learnt from these events than the actual winning, though we always like to win.”

Gold in the Sonar event went to the Dutch trio, helmed by Udo Hessells, with Robertson, Stodel and Thomas five points behind after the ten-race series.

Robertson said: “We’re pretty chuffed with this week’s performance. We set ourselves goals every day to try and put ourselves under a bit of pressure and I think we achieved the goals every day and just missed out on gold by a few points so it’s been good progress.

“The Sonar fleet is really tight – there are probably seven, eight, nine boats that can win races and it’s who can string it together that week to make the podium. The Dutch guys were fourth or fifth at the Worlds and then went on to win here so it just goes to show how close it can be and that we’re probably the team that’s most consistently up there.”

The 2.4mR Paralympic class also concluded racing, with Portland’s Megan Pascoe finishing fourth, and Helena Lucas fifth.

After a near-flawless week in which he counts only race wins on his scorecard, Weymouth’s Nick Dempsey has almost assured himself of gold in the RS:X men’s windsurfing event. The Athens bronze medallist and 2009 World Champion has amassed an 18-point lead going into the 10-boat double points-scoring finale.

Poole’s women’s match racing trio of Lucy Macgregor, Annie Lush and Kate Macgregor also guaranteed themselves at least a silver medal when they overcame Finland’s Silja Lehtinen in their nail-biting semi-final on Friday.

First blood went to the Skandia Team GBR sailors, but Lehtinen then pulled two matches back to leave Macgregor’s team fighting for their survival – and survive they did, winning the final two contests in the best-of-five encounter to book themselves into the final against Australia’s Olivia Price, who overcame USA’s Sally Barkow in her semi-final.