There is something delightfully silly about wanting to sail shorter and shorter boats over long distances. As I interview fellow Brit, Andrew Bedwell, I find myself smiling a lot. “It’s the ridiculousness of it,” Bedwell says when I mention the effect. 

Bedwell is talking to me about his plan to depart from St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, to sail the 1,900-mile distance across the North Atlantic Ocean to Falmouth Harbour in England in a boat only 3 foot 3 inches long. 

Courtesy of Andrew Bedwell

In an effort to get a sense of the living space in such a tiny boat, I look around for size-equivalent objects. Thirty-nine inches is three-quarters of a standard 60-inch bathtub. His boat has similar dimensions to a large trash can with wheels; the footprint of a small shower stall. As a former professional sailor-turned ocean rower, I am no stranger to going on long voyages in small boats. Even for me, the scale of Bedwell’s boat is mind boggling.

Courtesy of Andrew Bedwell

Departing in May 2023, Bedwell expects his voyage to take him up to 100 days. His objective is to set a new record for the shortest wind-powered vessel to cross the Atlantic and to get the record he must sail within “50 miles west of the most westerly part of Ireland.” Bedwell would like to avoid getting towed from there to land, but the record is the primary goal. 

If successful, he will break the current record held by a boat 5 foot 4 inches long and with considerable margin. Bedwell’s boat is a whopping 2 feet and 1 inch shorter.

His inspiration to tackle the record for the shortest-boat-ocean-crossing comes on the heels of a 54-year-long story between two rivals: an American and a Brit. Their quest, like Bedwell’s, was to be the person who had crossed the Atlantic in the shortest boat. 

The first to claim the record was the American, Hugo Vihlen, in 1968, who sailed from Morocco to the East Coast of the U.S. in a time of 84 days. Vihlen was 36 years old at the time of his voyage, working as a co-pilot for Delta Airlines and living in Homestead, Florida. His boat, April Fool, was 5 foot 11 inches long and the voyage was the subject of his first book, “April Fool, or How I Sailed from Casablanca to Florida in a Six-foot Boat.” 

Twenty-five years later, Vihlen, by then a captain for Delta Airlines and age 61, took to the Atlantic once again. He chose a northern route from west to east and his new boat, Father’s Day, was 5 inches shorter. The boat measured a mere 5 foot 6 inches long. 

On his first attempt in 1992, Vihlen was stopped by the U.S. Coast Guard a few miles off Cape Cod. They declared his boat “manifestly unsafe.” Vihlen’s second attempt was from Canada, departing from St. John’s Harbour in Newfoundland. 

The change of location offered key advantages: a shorter distance to England, closer proximity to the Gulf Stream and no U.S Coast Guard interference. In the harbor he met Tom McNally, a former fine arts lecturer from Britain who, at that time, owned a boat measuring 1 and 1/2 inches shorter than Vihlen’s Father’s Day. Vihlen and McNally become friends.

Light and variable winds scuppered Vihlen’s attempt to depart from Canada that year, so he returned home and set about lopping 2 inches off his boat’s rudder, in order to better McNally’s shorter boat. 

McNally had already attempted to cross the North Atlantic 10 years earlier in 1983. He had departed from St. John's Harbour, Newfoundland, bound for Falmouth, England, in his first mini sailboat Big C. The boat measured 6 foot 9 inches. 

McNally in his 6-foot-9 boat Big C, before departing Newfoundland in 1983. Photo by Alamy Stock Photo 

Strong winds blew out his sails toward the end, and he drifted for two weeks until a Russian trawler came to his rescue off the southern coast of Ireland. A crew member had picked up a message, which he interpreted as “look out for six men in a boat.” The actual message read, “look out for a man in a six-foot boat,” but this was too unbelievable. In high seas and winds gusting over 35 knots (40 mph), recovering McNally and his boat proved no small undertaking. 

One of the trawler’s idling propellers struck and holed Big C. McNally lost his grip and hung suspended by a rope tied to his boat’s mast. Plunged underwater, the pockets of his pants filled with water and his pants slipped off. The boom operator responded to the situation by swinging Big C and McNally — now semi-naked and upside down — toward the trawler. Thankfully a hefty Russian sailor on the upper deck was able to grab McNally in a bear hug and Big C was brought to rest onboard. Much laughter ensued. 

As Vihlen prepared for another attempt at the North Atlantic in 1993, Tom McNally decamped to Lisbon, Portugal, with his second boat, the 5-foot 4.5-inch craft, Vera Hugh. Low on funds but ever resourceful, McNally had built Vera Hugh using part of an old discarded wardrobe. As a cabin hatch he used the transparent door from an old side-loading washing machine. 

The wind direction was unfavorable; violent storms battered northern Portugal throughout December 1992 and 20-foot king tides made navigation hazardous. McNally took local advice: he had his boat trucked to southern Portugal and the small fishing port of Sagres. Here he met the same problem as Vihlen off Cape Cod. Local police would not grant him permission to sail in what they deemed to be an “unquestionably unseaworthy craft.” The Portuguese ‘Guarda Fiscal’ kept a watch on his boat continuously. 

When the wind direction finally shifted, McNally placed two bags of unusable gear on the dock and asked the Guarda to watch his belongings while he tested his boat. He would be right back, he told them. Needless to say, he was not. 

McNally continued on after being hit by a freighter on Day 2. He bailed his boat for six days to the island of Madeira where he could repair the crack. On the next leg of his voyage, he was forced to drink salty water, which was only partially desalinated by his ailing water maker. Eventually he rounded the citadel of El Morro and entered Puerto Rico’s San Juan harbor. This was 113 days after leaving Sagres in Portugal. His kidneys were near failure, but he recovered and sailed on to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. His voyage was over 5,500 miles in total, and in a boat 5 foot 4.5 inches long. He was finally the record holder of the shortest wind-powered vessel to cross the Atlantic and as an added bonus, the first person to cross an ocean in a vessel shorter than himself. He was 50 years old. 

McNally only held the record for a matter of months. Later the same year, Vihlen returned to St. John’s and reclaimed the title when he successfully sailed his 5-foot 4-inch boat across the North Atlantic to Falmouth. His boat, Father’s Day, remains a centerpiece in the Maritime Museum in the town of Falmouth where he arrived, and the story of this 115-day odyssey was chronicled in Vihlen’s second book, “The Stormy Voyage of Father’s Day.”

Andrew Bedwell standing on ‘Father’s Day,’ with permission of the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, England on Jan. 5, 2023. Courtesy of Andrew Bedwell

Not to be outdone, McNally mounted an attempt to to cross the mid Atlantic in 2002 in Vera Hugh – Cancer Research, a smaller iteration of his original 5-foot 4.5-inch Vera Hugh. The new version was a mere 3 foot 10.5 inches long. He managed to complete the first 800 miles from Gibraltar to the island of Gran Canaria without any issues, only for the boat and all his equipment to be stolen from the harbor in Mogán. 

Undeterred, McNally geared up for an ambitious double Atlantic crossing in 2009. He had a new, purpose-built 3 foot 10 inch boat, The Big C. His plan was to raise money for the charity Sail 4 Cancer by sailing from Cadiz to the Canary Islands, and on to Puerto Rico; sailing north up the eastern seaboard of the U.S. before heading back across to his home port of Liverpool. Sadly, illness frustrated his plans. For almost nine years he battled with several cancers including kidney cancer, which doctors believe may have been caused by drinking salt water during his voyage at sea. McNally passed away in June 2017. 

After McNally’s death, Andrew Bedwell came across Vihlen’s story. Nearing 50 years of age and married, with a daughter aged 9, a big challenge in a small boat appealed to Bedwell. As a professional sailmaker with a penchant for sailing small boats, he was gripped by Vihlen’s account of micro-sailing the North Atlantic. He contacted McNally’s daughter Lorraine. Her late father’s boat Big C had been in her garden behind a shed for almost 10 years. She was willing to sell. 

Bedwell is 6 feet tall. At 3 foot 3 inches, the boat is roughly half his size. I can’t help myself but ask, “What does your wife think about this?” Bedwell replies, “She thinks I am crackers, but she knows why I am doing it. I have always aspired to do challenges, always loved the sea.”

Big C has a sail area of 50.4 square feet. Courtesy of Andrew Bedwell

Only 80% of the boat is original but the challenge of space is the same. For power, Bedwell has two 30-watt solar panels affixed to the back of the boat, plus a 50-watt portable panel he can attach on deck in good conditions during the day. A hand-operated generator and a hand-operated water maker will keep his biceps busy (1,800 pumps will convert 1.3 gallons of seawater into drinking water). For the rest of his body, a physiotherapist has devised a program of exercises to stave off muscle wastage and deep vein thrombosis. He plans to take blood thinners as well, just in case. 

Bedwell’s diet offshore will consist of pemmican, a food that has seen a recent resurgence in popularity among doomsday preppers. A long-proven survival food that keeps for years, pemmican is made from beef fat, dried berries and dried beef. It’s a protein-rich substance that has historically been an important part of indigenous cuisine in certain parts of North America. For Bedwell, the challenge is not only calories per weight, but also calories per space. With its high fat content, pemmican can be heated and molded to fit around the inside of Bedwell’s boat. “How’s that on the gut? I ask. “It’s alright,” he says.

Courtesy of Andrew Bedwell

To sleep, he will curl up in a fetal position. Except when conditions are rough. On those days, he will be seated and strapped into his full-body harness. To pee, he can sit up with his head in the dome of the cabin hatch, but to poop, he plans to hang himself over the side. On learning this, I felt genuine anxiety. 

Before exiting the cabin he must first inflate the airbag at the back of the boat to give the vessel added stability. This can be done from inside. Next is the challenge of opening the hatch without shipping a wave into his living space and finally, comes the scramble on deck and onto the air bag so he can close the hatch. To get back onboard if he goes for a swim, there are handrails on the boat and a small step halfway up the back of the keel. 

As long as he stays attached to the boat, he should survive. 

Bedwell’s cabin. Photo shot from above, looking down inside. Courtesy of Andrew Bedwell

I have seen the diminutive 3-foot-3-inch McNally-Bedwell boat, Big C, as I was lucky to meet Tom McNally at the Southampton boat show in England in 2005. When I asked McNally how he had passed the time on his larger 5-foot 4.5-inch boat, he told me a funny story. 

An expat living in Portugal generously offered him a box of books, but only delivered the box on the morning of his departure. He left land sitting on the box without checking its contents. (This was at the beginning of his voyage from Portugal to Florida in 1993, so before mp3 players first came out in 1997.) When McNally’s boat was struck by a freighter and took on water, he discovered the box contained the complete works of Mills and Boon, originally published as escapist romance fiction for young girls and women in the 1930s. I laughed, so did McNally. He dried out the books, he said, and over his 113-day journey, he read every single paperback and then chucked the books into the sea!

In a boat 3 foot 3 inches, Bedwell won’t have the luxury of books. Without much power to charge his satellite phone or play music for long, he will rely on the ocean for entertainment. 

“It’s going to be like crossing the ocean in a trash can with wheels, while being strapped into the world’s best roller coaster for probably 70 days!” Bedwell exclaimed. 

Lia Ditton is an author and former professional sailor-turned-ocean rower. In 2020 she rowed a 21-foot boat solo and unsupported across the mid Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Hawaii and broke the women’s world record by 13 days. That was her 14th ocean crossing. She has sailed across the North Atlantic twice.