Schoolboy, 15, aims to smash record of youngest person to solo-sail around Britain

A 15-year-old schoolboy hoping to become the youngest person to sail solo around Britain ran into difficulty on the first night – and had to phone his mother to help him cook his dinner, according to the Daily Mail.

Timothy Long set off on his epic 10-week-long voyage across 1,600 miles on his 28ft yacht last week.

After leaving MDL’s Hamble Point Marina and mooring three hours later at Boatfolk’s Haslar Marina, he had to call his mother for assistance making dinner.

Long wants to become the youngest person to ever sail solo around Britain and beat the record of Tom Webb, who sailed around Britain aged 17 in 2011.

Long, who lives 100 miles from the sea in landlocked Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire, will typically sail 45 miles each day. But he will also make some lengthier 100-mile passages on his Hunter Impala 28, Alchemy.

He’s sailing counter clockwise, heading east along the south coast, after getting advice from a meteorologist.

Long, who plans to become a professional offshore sailor after his A Levels (and who’s never sailed further than 40 miles on his own), says: “I wanted to do something that was going to push me and take me somewhere new that I had never been to before, completely on my own.

“So I thought: why not sail around Britain?”

But the unpredictable British weather may extend his time out on the water and put a damper on his sailing schedule. Long’s been doing school work in advance, but may be forced to cut the trip short to make it back in time for the start of his GCSE year in September.

“I know it’s going to be a challenge and there will be bits where it’s going to be really tough,” Long says.

“The biggest factor with solo sailing is the fatigue – since you are on your own, you can’t go to sleep for hours because you have to manage the boat.

“So I will sleep a maximum of 20 minutes at a time when I’m sailing.

“This is by far the hardest thing that I have ever done because when you are solo sailing there is no one there to help – no support boat, nothing.

“This means that you have to be able to do everything ranging from navigation to looking after yourself and knowing how to fix anything that goes wrong on the boat.

“The British coastline presents numerous hazards, from the busiest shipping lane in the world in the Dover Straits, to the extreme tides of the Bristol Channel, amongst many others.”