West Mersea sailor Hannah Stodel won silver as part of Great Britain’s Paralympic Sonar trio at the World Cup regatta in France.

Stodel, along with John Robertson and Steve Thomas opened up the British medal tally in Hyeres, as their preparations for this summer’s Rio Paralympics continued in earnest.

The reigning world champions went in to the final day of competition for the Paralympic classes in overall third place.

However, a race win in the first of their two races pulled them up into the silver medal spot.

In spite of retiring from the second race of the day for inadvertently failing to complete penalty turns for an adjudged infringement, the trio held on to their silver medal.

The World Cup in France was the first of a three-regatta stint the trio will competed in over the next month, as they build up towards Rio.

Thomas said: “It’s been a good week. We had an objective coming in to the week to try and do the simple things well, try and get up to speed with the rest of the fleet and I think we achieved that.

“We had three race wins, which is really good.

“We had a bit of a sticky middle day with a third and a couple of middle scores so we dropped back into third place going in to today but we managed to come back into second.

“It was a good up and down week with some fight in there.”

The trio feel that they are in a good position with four months to go to the Paralympics but that there are opportunities for improvement.

Thomas added: “I think it’s about being consistently accurate right now, doing the simple things well, getting off the front row, having good boat speed and making the right decisions and intelligent decisions.

“We have plenty of opportunities to work on that now with Garda coming up and Medemblik which is the World Championship as well, so there will be a bit of pressure on us to try and perform at the Worlds just before the Games.”