While other 17-year-olds find it hard to get out of bed before lunchtime, Mike Perham has spent more than 140 days and nights sleeping for only 40 minutes at a time and eating icky freeze-dried meals, in an attempt to become the youngest person to sail solo around the world.

Perham, a college student who hails from that great seafaring town of, er, Potters Bar, is due to arrive back in Portsmouth in his Open 50 yacht at the end of August, just in time to claim his place in the record books. He had hoped to sail non-stop and be back home within four months. Instead, thanks to a string of technical problems, not to mention almost capsizing in the middle of the treacherous Southern Ocean, he will take almost 10 months. Yet he remains on course to beat Zac Sunderland, a Californian teenager a few months his senior, who completed his own sailing-boat circumnavigation less than two weeks ago.

The young Briton already holds the record for being the youngest person to sail across the Atlantic, a feat he completed at the age of 14. That trip took less than two months. Perham has been away from home for 8Å months on this voyage and is beginning to feel the strain. An unscheduled stop in Panama to fix a problem with the rigging hasn’t helped matters. “I just want to get going again now,” says Perham glumly. “I wasn’t expecting so many problems. Sometimes you do think: ‘Why did I get into this?’ I miss my friends a lot — I don’t really like being on my own — but I always knew it would be very hard.”

It was all his own idea, though, right? “Oh yeah. I wanted an adventure,” he says.

It’s remarkable that someone barely old enough to drive a car could safely navigate a 50ft sailing boat through the world’s oceans without assistance. The route to modern-day sailing glory, however, is very different from the one endured by the Canadian-American adventurer Joshua Slocum, who in 1898 became the first person to sail solo around the world. Slocum navigated Spray, his 36ft fishing sloop, without any technical aids, using the traditional method of “dead reckoning”, and took more than three years. He savoured his success for barely a decade before disappearing at sea during another perilous excursion.

By contrast, Perham’s boat, the quaintly named TotallyMoney.com (after one of his sponsors), is made from carbon fibre, so is extremely light and tough. It is also equipped with all the very latest communications equipment to enable salty sea pups to keep in contact with the outside world.

Halfway up the 50ft mast is a radar antenna looking out for boats and other obstacles — icebergs and whales being particular concerns in the Southern Ocean. Perham has a satellite navigation system, satellite tracking devices that relay his position every few hours to his website (www.totallymoney.com/sailmike/), a distress beacon to transmit his location to the emergency services and a device to convert sea ­water into drinking water. He can send e-mails to his friends and family on one of three Panasonic Toughbook laptops, he has two satellite phones and twice a day he speaks to his father, Peter, who is managing his trip from home. Then there are the cameras to create video blogs to post on his website, and two iPods.

Deep in the hull is a generator to power all this gadgetry, backed up by solar panels on deck, which provide just enough energy to power an auto­pilot system if the generator fails. The autopilot works by way of a sensor at the top of the mast, which calculates wind direction. Perham programs the system to travel at a certain angle to the prevailing wind, and it adjusts the rudder to keep the boat travelling in the chosen direction. If he were to be knocked unconscious, the boat would continue on course.

Isn’t that cheating, though? After all, anyone could circumnavigate the globe in a boat that sailed itself. No, says Perham, because, for a start, there’s no “autosailor” to adjust the sails, so when he needs to set a new course, or whenever the wind changes direction, he has to go up on deck and do the muscle work. In turbulent conditions, that could mean dashing onto deck every few minutes in a hail of seaspray, the boat rocking every which way, while he tries to set the sails.

“There have been some scary moments, especially in the Southern Ocean,” he says. “The boat almost capsized at one point — it tipped 90 degrees — but managed to right itself. In moments like that, when you’re thousands of miles from land, you really get a sense of isolation. If you did run into trouble, it could take days for anyone to come to the rescue.”

Perham says his autopilot has almost been more trouble than it’s worth. Having set off from Portsmouth on November 15 last year, he got only as far as Calais before it started playing up, and had to make an emergency stop in Portugal, followed shortly afterwards by almost a month of waiting for repairs in the ­Canary Islands. From then on, the journey took him across the Atlantic towards Brazil, then down to South Africa. He was forced to stop in Cape Town (where he crossed paths with Sunderland) to have a new auto­pilot system fitted and to fix a problem with a rudder bearing.

From Cape Town, Perham headed down into the Southern Ocean, where rough seas forced water into the electrics, prompting another, almost month-long, hiatus in Hobart, Tasmania. He then got as far as Auckland before having to make another emergency repair stop. Two weeks later, he set off again, making it all the way to Panama before needing yet more repairs. He hopes to set sail on Thursday.

“There have been frustrations, but there have also been a lot of highlights,” Perham says. “I remember when I first came in sight of Tasmania and I’d not seen land for over a month. I was about half a day out and I could see these massive cliffs, and you could smell Tasmania — the smell of fresh grass.”

Despite securing the sponsorship to fund much of his son’s scheduled trip, Peter, a freelance quantity surveyor, calculates that it has cost the family about £60,000 in hotel bills, flights out to see his son, repairs and lost earnings, but, having taught his son to sail when he was just seven, he remains unwaveringly supportive.

“I’m just hoping that by the time he comes back, he might have gone off his other hobby, bike jumping,” says the long-suffering father. “It’s basically jumping off things on bikes. I don’t think it’s a particularly safe sport.”

Perham Jr, meanwhile, is already busy planning his next nerve-racking adventure. “I’m not going to talk about it yet,” he says. “But it’s already more than planned.”

It's a bit slow thought

Extreme 40

Imagine sitting with the door open in a car that’s doing 40mph, and then leaning out as far as you can. Now picture the same thing but with the car tipped over onto two wheels and you’ll have some idea of what it’s like to race an Extreme 40. These 40ft catamarans, with 62ft masts, are designed to provide the sort of agile, fast-paced entertainment that sailing so often lacks. Their twin carbon-fibre hulls use the same technology as Formula One racing cars, making them light, stiff, responsive and able to turn on a sixpence.

Extreme 40s compete in the iShares Cup (www.isharescup.com), the third leg of which will take place during Cowes Week next weekend. Races last less than 15 minutes and come within yards of the shore, as the boats battle it out at speeds of up to 40 knots (46mph) on courses little bigger than a pair of football pitches.

Crashes are common: during last year’s Cowes leg, competitors chalked up a snapped hull, three broken masts and three “pitch-pole” capsizes — spectacular, end-over-end flips that occur when a bow gets buried beneath a wave at high speed.

What are they like to sail in strong winds? “Terrifying,” says Shirley Robertson, the double Olympic gold medallist, who will be skippering one of the boats next weekend. “You’re always aware how close you are to a major crash.”

As Mark Turner, the iShares Cup founder, says: “Racing Extreme 40s is about as far from gin-and-tonics on the back of a luxury yacht as you can get.”

Bladerider

Bladeriders can weigh as little as 70lb and use hydrofoil technology to fly several feet above the water, reducing drag and enabling them to hit speeds of up to 27 knots (31mph).

The hydrofoils are attached to the rudder and central daggerboard fin, generating lift like an aeroplane’s wing. The boats belong to a class known as “foiling moths” and also have canvas wings, which project from the hull, so the sailor can lean as far as possible and counterbalance the powerful sail.

“Once you’ve picked up enough speed, rather than bumping along on the choppy surface, you simply glide through the air,” says Tim Fraser-Harris, chief instructor at Datchet water sports centre, near Heathrow, which offers Bladerider courses. “It’s a bizarre feeling: you’re going extremely fast, but everything goes quiet.”

Courses cost £300-£600; you can buy your own Bladerider from www.bladerideruk.com for between £9,250 and £14,250, depending on the model.

Etlev-Flyer

The Jetlev-flyer offers even more extreme waterborne thrills, without the need to learn port from starboard. Simply strap the jetpack on your back and you can fly up to 28ft above the water, at speeds of up to 22mph. The Jetlev works by way of a four-stroke engine built into a float, which passes water through a 33ft tube and into the jet pack on your back, which then emits two powerful water jets, providing up to 500lb of thrust to propel you up and along. Designed in Florida, the first ones are expected to roll off the production line in September and cost about £86,000, so you may want to wait until your local water sports centre has one to hire. Go to jetlev.com for more details.

Paul Grogan and Emma Smith