Land Rovers in a farmyard are two a penny. Amphibious Land Rovers are rarer. In fact, the one parked in a barn at Liley Hall Farm in West Yorkshire is unique.
Farmer Steve Burgess has devised it with one aim in mind. With his partner Nicky Spinks, he intends to be the first to drive across the Bering Strait between Siberia and Alaska on a route that takes them from Cape Town to Cape Horn.
For the journey's biggest challenge, getting over the 50-something mile stretch of ice and water between the two land masses, Steve will be a sailor-driver. His original bog-standard Land Rover, converted into a versatile amphibian registered as a small ship, will be launched during a brief summer window of opportunity.
For most of the year, the Bering Strait is frozen and previous expeditions have thrown big money at devising vehicles that they could drive over the ice. None of them were road-going vehicles – and none succeeded.
"Big corporations have tried it, millionaires have tried it and failed. Now it's time to give a Yorkshire farmer a go," says Steve as he sat in his kitchen with Nicky and took a break from getting in the silage. He reckons the 45,000 miles Cape to Cape trip is the longest viable road journey, point-to-point, in the world.
To drive across the Bering Strait, two floats which are secured on the back of the Land Rover when it's on the road, will be attached to brackets on either side. The transmission to the wheels will be decoupled to power a propeller lowered at the back. A tiller will take over from the steering wheel.
There's no workshop manual for this hybrid which is the progeny of neither garage nor boatyard. The engineering ideas are all out of Steve's head. "I'm entirely self-taught," he says. "I've acquired skills as a farmer but I'm not much good on cars, not a brilliant motor mechanic."
Is the product of his thinking going to be all at sea when the big nautical adventure arrives? Will it perform like an invention from the hand of Heath Robinson? No. The first trial to find out if it would sink was to tow it round the village pond at Tong. It stayed afloat. Development progressed via outings on Coniston and Bridlington Bay to an attempt at a crossing of the Irish Sea last summer.
In Ireland, they inquired about a local skipper who would be prepared to come along as the safety boat and they found Mike Wood who runs fishing trips from Portpatrick. "Mike gave me a good grilling," says Steve. "After three hours and a few pints, we shook hands on a proposed venture taking into account time, tides, currents and ferry traffic."
The Land Rover was driven into the waves at Donaghadee and five-and-a-half hours later arrived just off the beach of Portpatrick near Stranraer, in Scotland. On the shoreline, the craft reverted to car again. Inching towards land, the transmission was switched from propeller to normal rear-wheel drive. The brackets holding the floats were raised to reduce buoyancy, transfer the weight to the wheels and give traction as they drove steadily out of the sea on to the sand.
They had sailed 22 miles at an average of five knots. It was not just mission accomplished. The Land Rover had performed perfectly in its nautical role. They dismantled the floats, washed some salt from the engine and drove home to their farm.
On the Cape-to-Cape trip itself they will take two Land Rovers. The one in the barn is the prototype. "It was second-hand, ex-army, pretty rough but sound," says Steve. "I had great difficulty in getting anyone to help with the development of the floats because of the litigation climate. I had no-one to help with the physics. I arrived at a figure of 2,500 litres of air that gave me negative buoyancy. But how much more air would I need to make sure I wasn't up to the shoulders in water in the Land Rover? I went for double."
From his sketches, he persuaded a company in Penzance to make the floats out of a material called Hypalon – inflatable inshore rescue boats are made from the stuff – for £20,000. "In the Sixties, the army had this idea of putting floats on Land Rovers but they didn't have the material to make it work." He went to look at their prototypes to see if there were any lessons there for him.
His inquiries in the boat and sailing community mostly drew a blank. "Trying to explain that you want to make a Land Rover float was met with a resounding, 'No, you can't do that' or 'No, that won't work'. He took his idea to Dan Evans of Evans UK, a Keighley company which specialises in making protective cages for rally cars. Over 15 months they calculated, made mock-ups, models and drawings.
Planning this expedition has been a five-year labour of love for the adventurous Nicky, 39, and Steve, 50, who met sky-diving and are also keen fell-runners. "We were in Africa, in Namibia, and we wanted to be in South America and thought, 'What about driving?'" says Nicky. "I think we underestimated the magnitude of what we're taking on."
Steve inherited a passion for travelling the world from his father. "He was an armchair traveller," says Steve. "He used to sit and read books about the golden road to Samarkand and said there was more to life than getting up and milking the cows. In his later years, he loved visiting the Balkans. "
Burgess senior had been the first in the family to take up farming – his own father had been an accountant in York. "He found a place and then this farm came available in 1961. It's on the Hopton estate – they used to be mill owners. We are their main agricultural tenants with 100 acres. The land is quite good, compared with a lot of hill farms, although it's cold with everything facing north-east." The Liley Hall farm site is listed in the Domesday Book and the present house is 400 years old. The fantastic views over gorgeous Pennine countryside makes you wonder briefly why anyone would want to leave it for far horizons.
Steve's full-time education stopped at 16. "I went to Athens backpacking, then hit the hippy trail to Kathmandu. That has certain connotations, doesn't it? In those days, cheap travel didn't exist. If you wanted to be a serious traveller, you had to be a Ranulf Fiennes attached to a military expedition. The hippy ethos was the other way of seeing the world. I was six or seven months on the hippy trail."
He came back to Yorkshire to have a family and raise two daughters, now grown up. But the wanderlust never left him. "I have fond memories of crossing Iran and Afghanistan – places you couldn't get to now. Adventure is like that – one door opens and another closes. One trip took two-and-a-half years from Africa to Australia. I suppose I saw 50 countries – I don't know, I didn't tick boxes. If the travel industry we have now existed back then, I might have gone into trekking in the Himalayas or Patagonia."
To get their Cape-to-Cape planning spot-on, they have already been to check out the hard bits. "We have got Admiralty navigation books, but you need local knowledge. There are some things you can't read about." Their fact-finding recce to the Bering Strait was in June 2001. "We looked at it and thought 'wow'", says Nicky. "Locals said we were the first expedition to go up and look at what they were tackling."
The temperature sometimes reads minus 28°C but combined with the wind chill it's more like minus 80 to 90°C. Their plan was conceived on the edge of the Bering Strait with a local, Daniel Michaels, all six foot seven of him, who runs the airstrip at Wales, a tiny Eskimo community which is the nearest habitation to the strait.
"He said, 'Do it this way', and I was already busy sketching," says Steve. "The weather is critical – being a farmer helps there because you are always checking on the weather in this job. There are the two huge land masses. There's the Arctic Ocean to the north and the Pacific to the south, two bodies of water, two sets of tides, contradictory currents – all working on this 56 mile-wide ginnel connecting the two oceans."
The strait freezes up as winter comes on but the ice is only solid by the shores. The centre of the strait is a constantly moving patchwork of water and ice slabs. The prospect of being crushed convinced them that driving over the ice was not the way to go.
Previous expeditions had attempted it by building a one-off machine capable of clambering over the ice and floating. But this method does not fulfil Steve's ambition of a drive Cape-to-Cape in one vehicle.
Once the thaw has happened, the big hazard in summer is fog. So their plan is this: arrive on the strait before the Siberian spring, then wait until July-August before converting the Land Rover to its amphibian state to cross in relatively ice-free and favourable sea conditions.
"One of the things in our favour is that we haven't got a lot of money," says Steve. "So we have to get it right. We can't make something here and find it doesn't work when we arrive. We have done a huge amount of research."
It was at the Bering Strait that fellow Yorkshireman Karl Bushby came to grief earlier this year when his walk round the globe west to east was interrupted by Russian officials who locked him up for entering their country without the required papers.
"The Russian Far East is a no-go area," says Steve. "The mechanism is in place to let you in although the bureaucracy is knee-deep. We have spent the best part of two years getting the contacts to get us permission. We engaged the services of a well-known explorer, the Ranulf Fiennes of Russia, called Dr Dmitri Shparo."
It seems Land Rover had planned to do this journey in 1998 to celebrate 50 years of the name. "They pulled the plug. They didn't want egg on their face because it's hugely risky. Land Rover was originally all about ruggedness and reliability which I subscribe to – they are icons in the heritage of exploration. But BMW, who took over, and now Ford, are more interested in the luxury and upmarket end of the business."
A Ford expedition in 1994 planned to drive Mondeos from London to New York across the Bering Strait. Except that what they planned to use on the hardest bit was not a Mondeo. It was a Canadian off-shore rescue vehicle for oil and gas rigs that is supposed to go over all terrain. "The vehicle they had which sank in the Bering Strait – and is still there – doesn't fit my criteria as a road vehicle.
"Neither does the one used by a property developer from Chelsea called Steve Brookes. It was adapted from a tracked 'piste basher' for preparing snow slopes for skiers." That one failed, too. Ford spent £4m on their attempt. The Land Rover budget was £1.3m. Steve and Nicky think they can do it for £250,000.
They will set off from their farm next summer. They are keeping the farm on with reduced activity. There are lots of natural breaks in the journey when Nicky may return to keep things going. They expect to reach their Cape Horn destination in December 2008.
A couple from Rawtenstall, who have sold a veterinary practice will come with them, along with engineer Dan Evans. "We still need to find quite a bit of money," says Steve. "We may sell seats on the vehicles for the historic crossing. There's a long sector in Russia, driving 1,200 miles up a frozen river, which might appeal to someone."
For those who don't fancy jaw-aching cold, what about the heat of Panama's rain forest and the hazards of the mythic Darién Gap – a 10,000-square-mile no-man's land of guerrillas, drug smugglers, poachers, and jaguars which has a reputation for swallowing explorers?
Steve thinks a bigger adventure than the Darién Gap for "guest volunteers" will be the Carti to El Llano road down the Archipelago De Sans Blas which will offer a challenging "winch and machete" progress for the Land Rovers.
The guest will need to share, at least for a time, Steve and Nicky's durability, their competitiveness and single-mindedness about the direction they want to take to succeed.
Steve sums up his years of planning. "All these others have failed and when someone tells you – 'You can't do that', well, it's like a red rag to a bull. With the research I've done, I can negate the problems I've encountered. This is a flagship expedition, a world first."
To contact Steve and Nicky, see www.cape-to-cape.org.uk