David Scott Cowper

After attending night school at the Nautical college for three years to obtain his First Mate's ticket, David's first boat was Airedale, a 29ft Wanderer Class built of teak, in which he cruised extensively in Scotland and Northern Europe before entering the 1974 Round Britain Race, which he completed in under 16 days and a half. He then entered the Observer Single handed race from Plymouth to Newport, Rhode Island which he completed in a little over 48 days.

These whetted his appetite for more single-handed sailing and he bought and had fitted out a 41 foot aluminium sloop, Ocean Bound, launched in April 1979. His route, stopping at Cape Town, Wellington and Rio de Janeiro broke Sir Francis Chichester's record of 226 days by one day.

Two years later, he set off the other way and his trip westward via all five southern-most capes took an amazingly fast 237 days, breaking Chay Blyth's time by 71 days and becoming the first person to sail single handed round the world in both directions.

David's interests then changed from sail to power and he purchased an ex-RNLI 42 Watson class wooden lifeboat, the Mabel E. Holland.  Having installed larger fuel tanks and jerry cans to give a range of 5,000 miles, he crossed the Atlantic to the Panama Canal, then headed across the Pacific to Darwin, Australia and continued round the Cape of Good Hope back to Plymouth, completing the first solo motorised circumnavigation on 30 January 1984.

But his most audacious voyage was yet to come. He dreamed of circumnavigating via the notorious Northwest Passage from Greenland across the Canadian High Arctic to the Bering Straits. He had six 3mm layers of epoxy-saturated khaya wood put on Mabel's hull to strengthen it and in July 1986 set of on a trip that was to last 4 years.

On that trip, described in his book Northwest Passage Solo, David and the Mabel endured some of the worst weather conditions in the world. With temperatures falling to -50°C,  Mabel was constantly under enormous pressure from the ice, surviving three Arctic winters. In the melt of the summer of 1987 Mabel partially sunk and, totally alone with the nearest settlement 250 miles away, he salvaged the boat and managed to get the two Gardiner engines working over the next two summers. Despite polar bears eating the aerial wires and difficult navigation due to the proximity of the magnetic pole, he succeeded in passing through the Bering Straits in August 1989, thus making the first solo transit of the Northwest Passage.He continued round the world, experiencing atrocious weather at the Cape of Good Hope and arrived back on 24 September 1990 to be the first vessel to circumnavigate the world via the Northwest Passage.

Since then, David has built a 48' aluminium boat, Polar Bound, specially designed for the Arctic and Antarctic and also using a Gardner engine similar to those which were so reliable on Mabel. He took her round Cape Horn and up the west coast of America, but when the Russians refused permission for him to take on the North East passage solo round the top of Russia he decided to do the North West passage from west to east. Again the ice was against him and it took two summers to get through, but he arrived back in Scotland in October 2004. He hasn't given up on the North East (or Northern Sea) passage and is once again preparing Polar Bound in the hope that permission will be given.

CM.