Artemis: A Wheelchair-Accessible Catamaran Sailing the World

Tom Hughes was a British Army captain, freshly back from a tour in Afghanistan, when a serious rugby injury in 2011 left him paralyzed. Doctors told him he’d never walk again. He didn’t spend long dwelling on it: Tom went on to complete a PhD, restore a vintage MG with a custom automatic gearbox, and build out a fully self-sufficient camper van from scratch during lockdown — one that can lift him into bed, stow his all-terrain “Terrainhopper” wheelchair, and run its own power and communications systems independently.

Then he set his sights on the ocean. Tom spent six years planning a solo circumnavigation and commissioned Artemis — built, like Desiderata and the 1295XL, by Multimarine at the Multihull Centre in Millbrook, Cornwall — a catamaran designed from the keel up for him to sail single-handed from his wheelchair. The design includes long “sugarscoop” sterns for easy wheelchair access, a tender with a drop-down landing-craft-style ramp, no steps anywhere aboard, and a fully sheltered helm station forward in the nacelle. Every sail maneuver runs through electric winches, power comes from a hydrogenerator plus 1,500 watts of solar, and shallow Delta wing keels keep her draft to just 4 feet, letting Tom get close to shorelines an ordinary keelboat couldn’t reach. She’s also outfitted as a dive platform, since Tom is a trained technical rebreather diver. He named her Artemis, after the Greek goddess of the hunt — and quietly, after his mother, Diane, echoing Artemis’s Roman counterpart Diana.

Tom cast off from Plymouth’s Mayflower Dock in September 2021 with an ambitious route in mind: Cape Verde, Brazil, the Falklands, the Strait of Magellan, then out into the Pacific and its atolls, on toward Australia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, and Southern Africa. By 2023, sailing two-handed with his partner Hannah, Tom had successfully rounded Cape Horn — one of sailing’s genuine milestones — and pressed on through the ice-and-snow-covered channels of Patagonia. Their friends at the YouTube channel Sailing Sweet Ruca documented the passage. That same year, Tom and Hannah got engaged.

Fittingly, the whole project traces back to Impossible Dream: Tom and the team behind Artemis first crossed paths with that boat’s story before coming to Cornwall to have Artemis built — connecting two very different accessible-sailing projects, decades apart, from the same yard.

Based on material from The Multihull Centre / Multimarine Manufacturing (multihullcentre.com), Multihulls World magazine (multihulls-world.com), and the Rugby Football Union Injured Players Foundation (rfuipf.org.uk). Follow Tom’s ongoing voyage at artemisexpeditions.com.