Epsom sailor Alexandra Rickham has expressed her delight at clinching a third straight SKUD World Championship title on the Paralympic waters of Weymouth and Portland - but insists there’s still more to come in her quest for 2012 gold with Niki Birrell.

The pair won last week’s 2011 IFDS World Disabled Sailing Championship title with a race to spare, at the very site where she will hope to top the Paralympic podium in 18 months’ time and put right her disappointment from the Beijing Games, where the British crew finished fifth in the two-person SKUD keelboat class.

Rickham and Birrell came into the six-day World Championships as defending champions from 2009 and 2010 and led the regatta from start to finish, fending off the challenge from the 20-boat international fleet, which included talented Australians Daniel Fitzgibbon and Liesl Tesch, who got the better of the Skandia Team GBR duo at the Skandia Sail for Gold World Cup regatta at the same venue last month.

“It is amazing, there are just no other words,” said 29-year-old Rickham.

“It is our third World Championships and this is definitely the one Niki and I wanted more than anything else.

“To win, on home waters, at the Olympic venue is just perfect and everything we could have asked for.

“It hasn’t been the easiest of weeks and it has been such varied conditions but I think we’ve been pretty consistent, and possibly where some of our competitors have fallen we’ve just tried to make sure that we were there to make up the difference.”

Rickham hopes their success on the 2012 waters will have proved a significant boost to their selection prospects for the Games next year.

“First of all, we need to get selected and hopefully winning here might have secured us that berth but everything now really is towards the Games," she said.

“It is great to win our third World Championship but the fact of the matter is that Niki and I want an Olympic medal and we would prefer that it was gold.

“That’s the aim, and our eyes are still fully focussed on that.”