Two years later, he repeated the feat, sailing against the prevailing westerly winds and rounding all five capes in 237 days, beating Chay Blyth's 59' British Steel record by 72 days and becoming the first person to circumnavigate Cape Horn in both directions single-handed and also holds the record for the fastest single handed time in each direction.

On 14 July 1986, he departed from Newcastle to make his way across the North Atlantic up the west coast of Greenland to enter Lancaster Sound, eventually reaching Fort Ross at the east end of Bellot Strait.

In 1988, he managed to reach Alaska having left the boat at Inuvik, Northwest Territories on the Mackenzie River, before one of the coldest winters in recorded Arctic history.

Continuing via Midway and Papua New Guinea, he reached Darwin, Northern Territory on the Australian coast just before the start of the hurricane season where he laid up his boat.

He had an aluminium boat, 14.6m Polar Bound, built and took it round Cape Horn and up the west coast of the Americas in 2002, but was refused permission by the Russian authorities.

From there the intended route is to South Australia, then across the Pacific Ocean to Fiji, Hawaii, Dutch Harbor and then through the Northwest Passage back to England.

MV Polar Bound arrived at Whitehaven UK completing his sixth solo circumnavigation and fourth Northwest Passage transit.

When Polar Bound called at Honolulu for a brief refueling stop in June 2011, before continuing up to Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians, agents for NASA were trying to find a vessel which would undertake a 900-mile journey out into the Pacific to try to locate a $2.5 million prototype beacon that had developed a fault, that they wanted retrieved.

It took Polar Bound 6 days to reach the location and at that time there was approximately 15 knots of wind blowing with a 4 – 5 ft swell running.

At 15.33Z on 29 August 2012, David Scott Cowper and Jane Maufe (four-times great niece of Arctic explorer Rear-Admiral Sir John Franklin) aboard motor yacht Polar Bound, became the first yacht to navigate west of Cape Prince Alfred on the original Northwest Passage through McClure Strait discovered by Captain Robert McClure aboard HMS Investigator in 1851.