Sailor Richard Isted is preparing to circumnavigate the Atlantic basin by himself, possibly becoming the oldest Bermudian to do so.

“I will be 79 when I set off,” Mr Isted said. “The trip would be from the Azores to the Canary Islands down to the Caribbean and then rounding back up to Bermuda to make a complete trip.”

He estimated the distance would be around 10,000 miles if he did reasonably well.

“My boat Bella can cover 800nm a week so you are looking at a three-month trip, providing all goes well.”

Mr Isted, an experienced sailor, is doing it for the physical and psychological challenge.

“It is a real awakening,” he said. “Once you get going, you are by yourself. There is nobody to ask for help. Maybe it will be a little bit of inspiration for people.”

It would also give him the mileage he needs to join a prestigious group referred to as The Ocean Sailing Club.

He knows some basic first-aid if something goes wrong with his health on the trip.

“I can deal with infections, perhaps mild lung disorders or mild cuts,” he said.

If disaster strikes, he has an emergency satellite beacon. However, help will probably not come for two days.

“If certain things happen you are going to die, heart attack — dead,” he said. “The key is, don’t get hurt.”

His biggest challenge is fear itself. He suffers from panic attacks and has laid in his bunk for three days before starting an ocean journey.

Mr Isted grew up in Spanish Point, Pembroke. He was raised mostly by his grandparents, Helen Louise Bernard and George Isted. His grandfather came to Bermuda from England after the First World War.

In his youth, Mr Isted loved music and was a drummer for local bands such as The Savages and The Invaders in the Sixties.

“I left Dellwood at 14, and worked on the Ocean Monarch and the Queen of Bermuda for a couple of years,” he said. “I was abruptly terminated due to hanging out in some ladies’ cabins, which you are not supposed to do when you work on a cruise ship.”

After his grandmother died in 1975, he moved to Florida and bought a boat.

“I was in my mid-twenties and it was a brutal experience,” he said. “There was the extreme heat down there and the boat was a complete mess.”

He was helped by a friend who was a talented woodworker, boat builder and fisherman.

“He basically helped me rebuild the whole boat,” Mr Isted said. “So we sailed this 35ft sailboat for five years. There was no engine. After that, I met my wife in the early Eighties.”

They married, had children, moved to Rhode Island and then to New York. He worked as a real estate broker for 25 years. He took up sailing again after they divorced around 2011.

“Our family owned Warren Brown’s 48ft boat War Baby, which we renamed Patriot,” he said. “We did very well in the Newport Bermuda race. We had past commodore Ralph Richardson on board.”

One of his scariest trips was on the Patriot headed for Bermuda.

“We were in a North American Cruises Rally to Bermuda,” he said. “I was with my son and four other people. I had sailed for years.”

They were 300 to 400 miles south of Bermuda when they hit a stalled tropical depression.

“We encountered four days of 40ft seas,” Mr Isted remembered. “Winds were pegging our anemometer at 60mph.”

It took them nine days to reach Bermuda when it normally would have taken three or four days.

Mr Isted sold Patriot in 2016 and bought a 30-footer. He used it to do several solo trips from the United States to Bermuda.

He found Bella, a Robert Perry designed 40ft sailboat, built in Taiwan in 1985, just outside of Annapolis, Maryland, a few years ago.

“Its official title for identification is Tashing Baba, which means ‘father’ in Taiwanese,” he said. “It has a beautiful, full keel and is heavy duty.”

When he first bought her, Bella had been out of the water for at least a decade. She needed a lot of work but her canvas and stainless steel looked as good as new.

Mr Isted was in Bermuda recently on what he calls a shakedown trip. He sailed Bella from Norfolk, Virginia, to root out any problems with the boat.

“When you do that, you find a multitude of things that you were never aware of that are wrong or need to be taken care of,” he said. “This morning I found some nuts just laying around. Stuff just works loose.”

This trip was his first time sailing in more than four years. He had a hernia operation six months ago.

He wants to do another such trip from the US to Bermuda in July.

“After that I am taking the boat to Maine for fairly extensive repairs and electronics upgrades,” he said. “Around November, I will sail from New England down to Bermuda ahead of the bad weather and stay here a couple of months.”

He will start his circumnavigation some time after that. He expects to finish his big adventure in the autumn of 2027.

Mr Isted admitted with a laugh that some of his friends think he is crazy for setting out on such a journey by himself.

“I have a friend in Georgia who is a phenomenal electronics guy,” Mr Isted said. “He said I have two batteries on the boat. If one goes out, I can still manage. If both go out, it’s all over. He advised me to take someone with me.”

Mr Isted will not be sailing with someone else because he gets irritated waiting around for people.

“Then you have to wait for the weather,” he said. “It just goes on and on. I decided I would just go myself.”

After the big trip next year his plan is to move to the mountains.