Let’s face it most of us are ordinary people with moderate wealth and expectations. We have moderate sized houses, cars that are neither too big nor too small, never have too many children and go on holiday to moderate sorts of places. If we have a boat, it won’t be very big or very small. However, it’s the extremes in life that continue to fascinate us. This is true no less in the marine world. Records for the longest, most expensive super yacht and the tiniest of boats to cross the seas keep falling to ever bigger and smaller vessels.

Despite the uncertain economic times that much of the world has been experiencing, the number of the world’s largest yachts continues to grow. Admittedly, many of these were commissioned in the boom years, but the design and construction phases have maintained pace. Only five years ago, a 60 metre boat would easily have made the top 100 world yacht league, now the smallest boat to reach this list would have to be 72 metres! Within the last year alone, the 162 metre “Dubai”, owned by the Ruler of Dubai, has been beaten into second place by the 180 metre “Eclipse”, owned by one of Russia’s new billionaires and one of the world’s wealthiest men, Roman Abramovitch. Although many of the details of these mega yachts are initially clouded in mystery the “Eclipse” was apparently built simply to be bigger than the Sheikh’s sleek “Dubai”!

While Germany and Holland remain the centres of mega yacht construction, with German boat yards having built seven of the ten new mega yachts during the last year and Holland building three, the number of countries involved in producing boats that will get into the top 100 list has diversified with Marco Yachts of Chile entering this elite field with three to reach the top 100.

Wooden Luxury Tender at Monaco © Douglas Freer Fotolia.com

With a sigh we have to admit that very few of us could ever dream of owning one of these huge beauties – anyway where would we put it? The tiniest of boats are a different matter entirely. Now here we are not talking about model boats, tenders or things like kayaks or wind surfers or even such boats as Optimists or Lasers, small though they might be. The tiniest boats that catch our attention are those that cross oceans – or make the attempt anyway. The owners of these little craft are eccentric, adventurous, philanthropists or just plain mad. The latest of a whole string of world records for the tiniest boats to sail the high seas now includes Tom McNally’s just under 4 feet long, “The Big C”. It has been built to cross the Atlantic from Spain to Puerto Rico, up the East Coast of America and then back to Britain. If this seems like a total impossibility or complete suicide, reflect that Tom has already crossed the Atlantic once in a 6 foot boat, also called the Big C, from West to East and in a five foot boat from Portugal to Puerto Rico in 1998. His latest feat is to raise funds for cancer research, hence the name. The Big C will be attached to two side floats that contain all the boat stores, such as they are, and Tom not only has to sleep in a sort of a sling, but will catch fish once his initial supplies run out, and eat it raw for food and make water at night with a manually powered desalinator.

Tom is not alone in his tiny boat accomplishments – the list of little ship adventurers is surprisingly long – longer than most of the boats on the list! Some of these were never really well thought out or just ran out of luck and boats and their occupants have often disappeared without a trace. In 1973, the 12 foot “Sea Egg” with John Riding the lone occupant, was lost in the Tasman after a crossing of the Atlantic and nearly the whole Pacific, while Bill Dunlop in the 9 foot “Wind’s Will” disappeared while crossing the Pacific in his round the world attempt in 1984. Luckier, in the 8 foot “God’s Tear”, was Wayne Dickinson, who survived his boat being smashed to pieces on Irish rocks in a force 10 storm after completing an Atlantic crossing.
In the early years of the twentieth century, when increasing affluence initiated a flurry of record breaking attempts in little boats, the number of twenty something foot boats making trans Atlantic crossings increased substantially with 20 foot “Trekka” being the first little boat to get into the record books with a circumnavigation, followed by several others, including the Australian built aluminium “Acroch Australis”, only 12 foot long that made a 500 day circumnavigation recorded in laconic style in the book of the same name.

Tiny and huge, adventurous, mad or plain billionaire, the stories will continue to fascinate us while we continue our own safe, moderate and definitely less newsworthy lives!