The omens were good from the start. Britain's Yngling girls, the fabled “Three Blondes in a Boat”, were facing a straight shoot-out with an ambitious crew from Holland for the first gold medal of the Olympic sailing regatta, but they had to suffer the agony of a 24-hour delay and, when they finally set out to race yesterday, it was in conditions that scared even the Princess Royal - and she was watching from the safety of shoreside.

As the wind raged and rain hammered down on Fushan Bay, the Yngling crew, Sarah Ayton, Sarah Webb and Pippa Wilson, looked over the side of their bucking dinghy on the first stretch of their medal race and spotted a flying fish leap from the huge waves. “I knew at that moment it was in the bag,” Ayton said. “When we launched our boat, we had a great day and we were followed by three dolphins, so we knew we must be lucky again.”

Luck plays a part, but this gold medal was won by a combination of dedication, meticulous rehearsal and a great deal of talent. So much could have gone wrong in the terrible conditions here, but the Team GB crew never looked in danger of surrendering the gold medal to the Dutch.

This was an astonishing achievement in so many ways: it was a second consecutive gold for the two Sarahs, a feat few British women athletes can boast, but also won on a course that has been so capricious: one day providing a puff of breeze, another blowing so hard you feared for the flagpoles.

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“Being British, we are used to the rain and the wind.” Ayton said. “You cannot describe what Sarah and I have been through for the past four years together and the last two for Pippa and us. We now know we are the best. Job done.”

The unspoken and unwelcome ghost at the feast was Shirley Robertson, who won gold with the two Sarahs in Athens four years ago. Robertson left the partnership on acrimonious terms, but she was at the quayside as the Yngling girls landed and was first to extend her congratulations. But the divorce had left a mark until Wilson got on board two years ago to revive their gold-medal hopes.

“It was a fantastic programme to join,” Wilson said. “The girls are amazing to sail with, we all talk the same language in the boat. It was a match made in heaven. Down the last run, we had quite a bit of a lead and all the other boats were piled up. That was the chill-out time and we just had to get to the finish line.”

It all seemed so easy last night as the crew left for a party with their team-mates, but the four years since Athens were nowhere near plain sailing. The search for a replacement for Robertson lasted two years, while there was the money to worry about. The Yngling campaign is one of the most expensive in sailing, costing an estimated £130,000 a year and twice that in an Olympic year.

There were no tears, although Webb said: “We were quite close when we were towed along the wall and you could see our supporters, the rest of Team GB and parents and it hit home that we had done something really special and we had done it for them.”

The Yngling girls can relax for a few weeks until their attentions turn to 2012. But before then, there was a party to go to last night, although it was not expected to last long after the rigours of the past week. “One glass of wine and we'll probably be wasted,” Ayton said. That is still long enough to toast another Olympic gold.