One person, one CNC kit, and a plan to sail a 5.8-metre plywood boat across the Atlantic.
The journey to take a boat across an ocean, alone, has been a long one. It's taken many forms, different vectors, and partners in crime. Ultimately, the conviction to do something came with the realisation that dreaming about it would not make it happen. Dreams make good stories, but everything important happens when we are awake and act on those dreams. The idea of building a small boat and sailing it across an ocean also came from a sense of adventure and an insatiable optimism that ordinary people, with no boatbuilding experience, can achieve something meaningful and a lifelong dream. If you're the one at a desk job with an idea rattling around in your head that won't go away — this is for you.
There are a lot of ways to live a great life. For me, it comes down to one thing: an adventurous one. An adventure where we've moved beyond our comfort zone and the day-to-day actions that often consume us. In many ways, adventures are the heartbeat of the human spirit. It's how we grow. It's how we push our own limits, learn, and through that process attempt to realise our highest potential.
Underneath it all sits a simpler arithmetic. Every hour is non-refundable. There is no setting time aside for later and no making more of it. The account only runs one way — it runs down — and the one real decision we get is what the hours go toward. In part, spending them well means deciding how much risk to take with them.
There are two ways to misjudge risk. Take on too much risk and something breaks: the boat or perhaps the budget. Everyone understands that failure, and everyone is quick to warn you about it. Risk too little and nothing breaks at all. You simply reach the end having never tried. Nobody warns you about this one, because playing it safe doesn't look like failure until it's too late to do anything about it. Admittedly, the line between the two is a fine one, and all of us, knowingly or not, are dancing on it.
If I have to risk one of the two mistakes, I'd rather overreach than never try. This project is my attempt to live with a stubborn, all-in tenacity, so that as the world unfolds around me, I meet it with enthusiasm rather than regret.
Likely, I'm out over my skis, and many hard-won lessons are coming my way. I am sure there will also be critics, naysayers, and individuals doubting. Friends and family asking: "Is everything OK?" Fair questions, all. But it's here that I leave it to Roosevelt, who said it best:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how [we] stumble… credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives… who errs, who comes short again and again… who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
The above is not intended as a call to arms, nor a dismissal of opposing views, but rather a personal conviction that perhaps helps explain, in part, why I took this on.
The plan
This is the working log of the build of a Class Globe 5.80 sailboat, with the goal of racing it across the Atlantic Ocean in 2028. The Globe 5.80 is a 5.80-metre plywood ocean racer designed to be built by one person in a tent or garage-sized space and sailed singlehanded across oceans. That's the whole appeal: no boat yard, no crew, no high-tech machines or instruments. Just a plywood kit, a party tent as a shelter, about 750 hours of work, and then a race across the Atlantic. The initial qualifier leg of the McIntyre Globe 5.80 Transat is from Lagos, Portugal to Lanzarote, Spain in late December 2028, and the Atlantic race proper is from Lanzarote to Antigua, which is roughly 3,000 nautical miles. Alone.
What I don't know
Which is plenty. I don't have all the answers, and this log won't pretend otherwise. The plan is to take it as an experience — and as an experiment. Stay objective. Keep an open mind. Nobody hands you a rulebook for something like this, and copying someone else's would defeat the purpose — the rules get earned the slow way: you put real questions to the work and to yourself, and you keep only the answers that survive the plywood, the wind, and the waves. And if there's one thing I already know, it's that enthusiasm starts a boat, but consistency finishes it. Seven hundred and fifty hours don't happen in a burst; they happen a few at a time, week after week. In that spirit, I'll keep a record of what I ordered, what went wrong, and what I'd do differently, so it's useful to the next generation of owner-builders staring at a stack of plywood.
We all know it won't last forever. So: what comes next? What comes next is a platform built on a very stubborn driveway, a party tent raised over it, and an impending crate of plywood.