With only a little irony apparent, the Brittany native Louis Mauffrier speaks of his “American Dream” – to squeeze his lanky frame into an awkward, small and dank space, subsist for a month on a diet of water and dried, irradiated food, and sleep for but a half-hour at a time.

The jail this Frenchman wants to break into is a 21-foot sailboat crossing the Atlantic Ocean from France to Brazil, in a biennial sail, the Mini-Transat 650, three years from now.  He doesn't care about winning the race, he emphasizes, only about finishing it.

Mauffrier, 39, with his wife, Pascale, and their children, Lucien, 11, and Antoine, 6, lives in an apartment, appropriately, on River Road.  They've been in the States for three years.  He works as sales representative of a European cheese concern.

Great-grandson of the captain of a three-master, Mauffrier describes himself as “a sailing guy.” It was during the 2003 Mini-Transat 650 last October that he decided to enter the 2007 race.

The trans-Atlantic sail spans 4,250 nautical miles, from La Rochelle to Salvador de Bahia, via Lanzarote in the Canaries.  About 70 boats enter.  The race gets its name from the length limit of the solo craft: 6.5 meters.  The boats can be only 3 meters wide.  After 30 days alone on board one of them, a microscopic Manhattan studio apartment would seem palatial.

Before he can sail in the race, Mauffrier must build his boat.  In Newport, Rhode Island, he and two Americans, Drew Wood and Katy Ambach, pooled resources and energy, and last July, using a high-tech and lightweight unidirectional carbon skin, they started crafting the hull of the first of three innovative sailboats.

The hull is constructed as a sort of foam-on-carbon club sandwich. The 11-meter mast is nearly twice as long as the boat, and the 10-meter Dacron sails offer a surface area of 114 square meters – “a monster.“ The result of the state-of-the-art design, Mauffrier says, is that heading downwind the craft will achieve speeds of up to 24 knots as it literally flies above the water on a layer of air, as kind of a sailing micro-hovercraft.  Upwind, it can move at perhaps five knots.  “You can't go faster than the wave you are creating,” Mauffrier explains, with an air of patient resignation.

He and his colleagues finished last month.  The boat, said to be the first of its kind to be built in the United States, weighs 400 pounds – but for racing it will weigh nearly a ton more, thanks mostly to water ballast.  That huge amount of ballast hints at the boat's stability.  Mauffrier calls it unsinkable – and indeed it sounds more Molly Brown than Titanic.  Even if the little boat should turn over, there's a brilliant emergency compartment with a pair of trapdoors top and bottom, so that the sailor eventually can wriggle to safety even from an upside-down boat.

In September, Mauffrier transported the hull to New York, hoping to be able to keep it on Roosevelt Island while he finished it in the coming months.  The idea, which Mauffrier discusses with characteristic affable intensity, was to enable the Island's residents, especially the children, to watch and even participate as work on the sailboat proceeds.  Mauffrier argues that Roosevelt Island's environment is more an ocean one than a riparian one (“It is not a river,“ he says, “It is a salty island.“), and he regards it as a travesty that no boat is docked here.  “The boat would be a door to the sea which is around,” Mauffrier says.

Negotiations with officials of the Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation (RIOC) did not bear fruit, however.  At last word the carbon boat, called Black Face, was stowed in a Mauffrier friend's space in Fresh Meadows, Queens, until a suitable way station could be found for the final 500 hours of work on it.  The Frenchman expects that the boat will be put in the water next spring and that he will sail a U.S. qualifying course next summer.  To compete in the Mini-Transat 650, sailors must demonstrate the ability to complete with their craft a 1,000-mile sail.

If all goes well, Mauffrier would then sail in a qualifying race in Europe the following summer, of 2006, and finally in the climactic race in October 2007.  On the way, he hopes to publicize “the rights of the children of the world” and his support for Amnesty International.

Preparing for a long ocean race in a small sailboat entails more than learning how to handle a sail.

For one thing, you need money.  Though the Mini-Transat was inaugurated in the 1970s in part as a modest alternative to the multi-million-dollar budgets that already were necessary for ocean races appealing to the yacht-owning class, it's not cheap.  Some producers make donations of materials, other non-monetary contributions can be had, and ultimately the sale of the boat can defray expenses.  If Mauffrier were to commission the entire project, he estimates costs as well into six figures.

Putting accounting aside, the sailor must contemplate the security training, to handle the stress and to cope with any potential disaster.  As Mauffrier describes it, sailboats in the Mini-Transat 650 are allowed no electronic controls and only a limited VHF communications capability, which allows transmission of three basic messages to the single large escort boat: “I have no problem;“ “I have a problem but I can handle it;“ or “I have a problem and I need help.”

Then, too, it sounds like a preposterously grueling regimen, this solo ocean sailing, because of the cramped spaces, the unappetizing diet, and especially the erratic sleep pattern that's required and the pain of never really being able to stand erect, instead wallowing on your bottom, virtually nonstop, in high humidity.

Still, for Mauffrier this enterprise, after three-plus years of preparation, will be worth it.  He speaks of sailing as “a matter of harmony.“ He speaks of finding “my personal way.”

“Once you've done that,“ he says of the Mini-Transat, “you're not the same as before.”

Even as Mauffrier dreams of life after October 2007, and his ultimate goal of sailing solo around the world, he delights in the challenges of the next three years, and especially of finishing the race.  He insists that he doesn't care where he finishes, first or last, that he doesn't care about somehow outpacing the many professional sailors involved.  He cares only that he finishes.

Sitting over a beer at Trellis, Louis Mauffrier persuasively declares: “If you arrive, you won.  And that's how life is working.”