NEXT month Hilary Lister will attempt to sail from Calais to Dover using only a straw to steer her yacht through the world’s busiest shipping lane.

She lost the use of her arms and legs to illness long ago and can move only her head, which will be less than 2ft above water on a route where passenger catamarans churn up wakes 8ft high.

“I think she’s absolutely barking mad,” her husband, Clifford, said at their home near Canterbury, “but I’m very pleased she’s doing it.”

Mrs Lister, 33, is in constant pain and has spent half her life helplessly monitoring the gradual loss of sensation in her limbs. She was contemplating suicide before she discovered sailing two years ago. Now she hopes that her quest to become the first quadriplegic sailor to cross the Channel alone will inspire others and raise money for disabled sailing.

Pindar, the printing company, has lent Hilary a 26ft (8m) glass fibre racing boat adapted with parts from one of her old wheelchairs, at a cost of about £2,000.

Mrs Lister will be strapped into a cushioned racing driver’s seat. She will pilot the boat by sucking and blowing gently on two plastic straws linked to a control unit that operates the tiller and the two sails. Breathing in on one straw will steer the boat to starboard; breathing out will guide it to port. The other straw controls winches that adjust the sails.

There is, she said cheerfully, something “quintessentially English” about the project.

The record attempt is scheduled for the second half of August, but so far she has been in a “sip/puff” boat only twice. She has, however, spent “a whole half hour” in a swimming pool, working on emergency rescue techniques.

Born in Hampshire, she enjoyed a healthy and idyllic childhood and grew up as a sports-loving tomboy. At 11 her knees started to get sore, but she thought nothing of it. By 15 she was in a wheelchair.

At 17 consultants correctly diagnosed Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy, a degenerative disease of the nervous system, but this was overruled by two psychiatrists, who decided that her problems were all in her mind.

“They thought I was doing it all for the attention,” she said. “They kept asking if I had felt unloved as a child.”

She won a place at Jesus College, Oxford, to read biochemistry. At the end of her third year the pain spread to her back, leaving her unable to get out of bed. “I took my finals flat on my back and full of diamorphine,” she said. “It was like a month-long epidural.”

By the time she married, in 1999, she had lost the use of her arms. “I sat at home and did nothing for four years,” she said. “I became more and more withdrawn and depressed, and my ‘Get out of jail free card’, the bottle of pills that could end my life, started to become a real option. I had nothing to live for.”

Everything changed when a neighbour took her sailing in 2003. “From the first second, I just loved it,” she said.

Seven months ago she met Emma Richards, the round-the-world sailor, who introduced her to Pindar. She has been offered a berth on a round-the-world voyage, but her health is still deteriorating.

“I don’t want to live to 70 — my day-to-day life is too hard,” she said. “It’s quality of life, not quantity, that’s important.”

Next month, for about seven hours, she will have complete freedom to go where she wants by herself.

For more information and to pledge your support, please visit www.hilarylister.co.uk .

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