A 71-year-old cancer survivor from Austin, Texas took a 16-foot flat-bottom aluminum jon boat — the kind of boat you'd take crappie fishing — around the Great Loop by himself in 19 days, 13 hours, 1 minute. He crossed 400 miles of open Gulf, ran up to 100 miles offshore, survived 10-foot seas in a boat weighing 539 pounds, and became the most-watched story the Loop has ever produced.
He left Navy Point, Pensacola at 7:31 a.m. on July 12, 2025 and crossed his own wake there 19 days later. The route: a 400-mile open-Gulf passage on a 170 heading — running as much as 100 miles offshore in a 16-foot boat — to Fort Myers, across the Okeechobee Waterway, up the Atlantic ICW past the Statue of Liberty, into the Hudson and the Erie Canal in its bicentennial year, under the Mackinac Bridge, down Lake Michigan to Chicago, then the Illinois, Mississippi and Tennessee–Tombigbee rivers to Mobile Bay and home.
That Gulf crossing is what made him famous. As he put it: "That lit the fuse."
| Hull | Weldbilt 16-foot flat-bottom aluminum jon boat, 7′ (84″) beam — built for him free of charge after his Arctic hull cracked |
| Power | Single 60 hp Tohatsu, tiller-steered |
| Fuel | Seven 12-gallon tanks (84 gal), plumbed so he could draw from any one — roughly 800 miles of range |
| Structure | Triple full-length internal keelsons, heavy forward impact structure, three keels overlaid with ¼″ angled aluminum — an idea borrowed from the Inuit mechanics who welded a Lund keel onto his cracked hull in the Arctic. Added about 80 lb. |
| "Panga front" | A tall blunt bolt-on bow, mocked up by Youens in cardboard and fabricated sight-unseen. "It probably saved my life." |
| Living | Three plastic tubs for food, sleeping gear and tools. Slept mostly in the boat, a tent ashore. Toilet: a white bucket. |
Six-foot-five, from Lake Jackson, Texas, living in Austin; wife Deborah, a retired schoolteacher and librarian. His first jon boat came at nine or ten years old — a Scott-Atwater 3.9 his mother bought broken at a garage sale that he and his father got running. He sold 27 boats in one Friday afternoon at a boat show and got hired by the founder of Glastron; he retired at 52 from Briggs & Stratton.
Then the second act: he paddled the Mississippi solo as a retirement gift to himself, hiked the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim some 20–25 times, ran the John Muir Trail, and founded an aerial-imaging company before drones were a thing. He holds a Guinness record for the longest continuous jon boat journey — 2,244 miles in 12 days — and has run roughly 2,000 miles through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, crossing Coronation Gulf with a 41-inch rip in his hull and both bilge pumps running.
His daughter Rachel died at 35. He was diagnosed with thyroid cancer three days later. During the 2025 run he ran aground in South Carolina on the sixth anniversary of her death.
"There's no way in hell a johnboat can do that. Lake Michigan will eat you up and spit you out." — a skeptic, to Youens
"That just put steam under my ass."— Robert Youens, Texas Monthly
Youens beat Capt. Scott "Red" Flowers' mark of 19d 19h 50m by 6 hours and 49 minutes. But by the time he finished, that was no longer the outright record: Peter Hajas and the crew of Lady Lor had run 12d 18h 10m during an overlapping window. So Youens holds the solo and single-engine records — the fastest anyone has done it alone, and on one motor.
"I don't do Guinness World Records… That's the beauty of the internet and trackers and stuff. I got several people that can vouch for what we did, and it's kind of an honor thing."— Robert Youens
The run drew 49 million Facebook page views. He threw out the first pitch at a Pensacola Blue Wahoos game the day after finishing, and keynoted the Toronto and Miami boat shows.
"Oh, everyday guy, everyday boat, old geezer, cancer… So I think that might have been the magic in the corn, you know, a 71-year-old cancer survivor in a jon boat. But the magic was the people. We loved each other. It was a give and take. They gave and I took."— Robert Youens, Power & Motoryacht
At 72, he came back for the outright record with a purpose-built boat and a partner. They launched from Brooks Park Boat Launch, Chickasaw, Alabama at 10:00 a.m. on Monday, July 13, 2026, targeting under 10 days.
| Boat | Custom Weldbilt 2370MV — 23 ft, 7′8″ (93″) beam, again named Ageless Wanderer |
| Power | 140 hp Tohatsu with a 25″ extra-long shaft (some outlets reported 120 hp) |
| Built for abuse | Extra ribs, triple full-length keelsons, overbuilt box-tube transom with double knees, and an ice skid on the center keel for high-speed log strikes on the rivers |
| Setup | Enclosed sleeping compartment so one man rests out of the weather while the other drives, hydraulic steering, night-vision camera, electric trim tabs — built to run 24/7 |
| Co-driver | Steve Hernden — "Tortuga Steve," Cape Coral firefighter and charter captain, and himself the 28-day record holder from 2022 |
| Shore team | Jack Dunn (100-ton USCG captain, ground lead), Shay Gibson (meteorologist), Quinton Clark (strategy and navigation) |
Seven days in they were tracking almost exactly on outright-record pace — roughly 2,417 miles in 6 days 22 hours, averaging 14.5 mph against the 14.7 the record required. Then, on July 20, 2026, running down Lake Erie, the welds began to fail: boaters following the attempt reported three cracked welds at the ribs and a chine weld split roughly three feet long — daylight visible through the hull — and the boat taking on water. They diverted into Erie, Pennsylvania and trailered to a welding shop. The attempt was over.
The specific hull failure comes from boaters following the run closely and posting photographs on The Hull Truth forum, not from an official statement. Distance and elapsed time are computed from his own public Garmin tracking data. No news outlet has yet reported the ending, and Youens has not published a detailed post-mortem. This page will be updated when he does.
Youens' 19d 13h 1m stood for thirteen months. On Sep 4, 2026, Fast Marine's Martin Bysiewicz closed the Loop on a single-engine jet ski in 18d 5h 23m, beating it by 1d 7h 38m. There's an honest asterisk: Youens ran completely alone, while Bysiewicz had teammate Steven Fulladosa riding alongside on a second ski for most of the Loop (Fulladosa didn't make the final leg, so Bysiewicz crossed the line alone) — so whether the new mark is a solo record, or a single-engine record with a support rider, is a live debate. Weigh in on the site poll. Either way, a 71-year-old in a 16-foot, 60-hp jon boat, alone for nearly twenty days, remains one of the great runs in this sport.
"Because it's a challenge. Because they feel healthy and they're up to it. And heck, I'm a 72 year old man. I feel healthy. It's a great challenge. And I get to get out there in nature, feel the pulse of the earth and the ocean. And what else could you hope to do when you're my age?"— Robert Youens, WKRG, July 2026