Mingming II & the Islands of the Ice

An excerpt from Roger Taylor's book, plus an interview with the small-boat adventurer. Oh and a free book giveaway of course!

The encounter began innocuously enough. We had gybed back onto port tack to head north-east again, towards the eastern end of Kongsøya, in a breeze that was once more fading slowly. The evening was well advanced, but at this latitude in mid-summer, that meant nothing more than a slight reduction in the intensity of the light. The sun was still there, well masked by a covering of cloud, but it had declined to a shallow, less effective angle. Although midnight was only an hour or so away, we were still in broad but dull daylight. 

My eye was drawn to some commotion ahead, signalled first by a gathering flock of agitated birds, and followed within a few seconds by several whale spouts. These were bushy, rectangular parcels of vapour, the typical spout of the humpback whale, and sure enough an unmistakable white fluke was raised skywards then disappeared. Another soon followed, and another. We were heading straight into a pod of leviathans.

At that moment, nothing seemed more appropriate. I recalled immediately my first visit to Jan Mayen, the first truly Arctic scene I had experienced, with its mix of mountain and ice and pulsing sea life, and my thought that all that was needed to complete the tableau was the raised fluke of a humpback whale. Here now was a remarkably similar scene. The line of cliffs to our north did not quite match the mountains of Jan Mayen in either grandeur or beauty, but they made up for that deficiency by the power of their bleakness and by their far more impressive air of remoteness. Here, we were almost five hundred miles closer to the North Pole. These islands spend most of the year locked into the pack-ice. Few humans ever come here. It was the perfect backdrop for a group of gambolling humpbacks.  

The whales were milling about off our port bow, but some aspect of their general movement gave me the impression that they were heading the opposite way. On an impulse I disconnected the self-steering, put the helm down and brought us round onto the wind, so that we were now sailing along with the whales, perhaps a hundred yards ahead of them. I ducked down to grab a camera and a camcorder, sorted out the steering lines, and, standing in the hatchway, settled into our new course. I took a few photographs of the whales surfacing astern and waited to see what would happen.

I had assumed that the whales would quickly pass us, and that if I were lucky they might come close enough to enable me to get some decent images. I had no expectation that they would take any particular interest in Mingming II, still less that they would come in to examine her, and even less that they would subsume her into the pod and cruise companionably alongside, shoulder to shoulder.

After a few minutes spent with some distance between us and the whales, they started to move closer. By now I had dispensed with the camera and started filming with a camcorder, holding it in my right hand, while manipulating the steering lines with my left hand. Two whales, almost side by side, changed direction and angled in directly towards Mingming II.   At first I thought it was just a chance alteration of course, but it soon became clear that they were heading straight for us, and deliberately so. In they came, surfacing and breathing, almost in unison, every half minute or so, until they were right there, right under my nose, just a few feet off the starboard quarter.

There are few things on this planet as thrilling as the proximity of a huge baleen whale. To sail along in the company of a pair of monsters getting on with their lives at the ends of the earth defies adequate description. All experience is stripped of relevance and meaning; the world and one’s place in it is redefined at every level. Thought is reduced to tingling primeval sensation; there is nothing but the moment and its awful deliciousness.

Yes, it was truly terrifying to have two whales, each forty to fifty feet long, rolling their absurdly angled backs within a whisker of Mingming II’s hull. I could not see their pectoral fins, but the port fin of the closest must have been almost beneath us. After each breath, the whales maintained themselves just a few feet below the surface. The air above was wild with screaming birds tracking their course, but I could follow their movement anyway, by the great circles of light-green aerated water produced by some minor activity of their blowholes. When they surfaced, I realised what an insipid descriptor the word blowhole is. These were massive apertures, the diameter of dustbins, ringed around with a huge donut of muscle. The thunderous discharge of steamy air, the spout itself, was the best part of two feet across. The escaping gas was just a blur, a rushing mass powered by a high-pressure hose of industrial proportions. With the wind angling in from ahead of us, I was spared the stink of this breath, although I would have welcomed it; it would have added another dimension to the overpowering impression of the moment. Just once, in the fraction of a second as the head of the nearest rolled forward, I caught a glimpse of the fist-sized tubercles, the hair follicles that sprout along the upper jaw.

The two whales off the quarter were joined by a third, a little further off and more square on the beam, and so we were now four creatures of the sea, conjoined in a provisional harmony, and mooching along in the Arctic dusk. To the north, the cliffs and glaciers of Kongsøya overlaid the scene with an appropriate wildness. I was by now fully absorbed into the power and strangeness of the moment.  Concentration, fascination, fear and delight had combined to drag me through the façade of mere representation, and into the tingling idea that lay hidden behind. I had passed beyond care and thought into nothing but the unconditioned feeling of pure aliveness. The scale and closeness and sheer outrageous strength of these animals ranging alongside spoke as eloquently as anything could of the force of matter and the inadequacy of our own attachment to our limited time and even more limited space. For a few seconds I lost that attachment and floated free into a state of unconstrained mindlessness. For a moment I forgot the voyage, the mundane and temporal journeying across the sea. I forgot where I was and why I was there, and grasped, for a second or two, the stillness that sits outside of time.

A man’s body is an insistent partner and I was quickly brought back to earth by the increasing pain in my hands. The fingers of my right hand, in particular, now felt welded by cold to the camcorder. My shoulder, too, ached from the strain of holding the camera aloft. I had lost any sense of how long I had been standing out in the freezing Arctic air with little protection against it.

I pushed aside all thoughts of physical discomfort and concentrated once more on trying to etch into my mind the finer details of the whales still hugging close alongside. It was the anarchy in the shaping of their dorsal fins that fascinated me: the humpback fins had nothing of the beauty and precision of form that characterise the dorsal fins of all the other baleen whales. Each of the three whales had a dorsal fin of a distinctly different profile. None of the fins resembled the usual finely-curved crescent of their cousins. None was a clean-lined falcate sickle sprouting straight from the smooth plains of the whale-back. Each fin was arrived at by stages, and each was somehow crudely misshapen and asymmetrical. The whale-back itself was first enlarged by a long escarpment, a smooth bump several metres long. Crowning this was a second shorter and narrower excrescence that gave the back a terraced look. The fin itself sprouted from this second hummock. It started in an appropriate manner: a smooth blade rising slowly. It was then that the anarchy and evolutionary confusion began. In one of the whales the smooth line of the blade became a series of angular steps, a kind of crudely built staircase, as the fin rose to its apex. The top was squared off: a long oblong box that fell away almost vertically. The after edge of the fin, where one might have expected some hydrodynamic scalloping, was no more than a ragged cliff descending to the ridge that supported it. Another of the fins was a little more inclined towards the crescent, but here again it had all gone wrong: the fine point of the sickle had become an outsized rounded globule. I wondered whether something evolutionary and directed was going on here, whether several configurations of the fin were competing for ascendancy, or whether the cause of these disparities was something more mundane: damage caused by fighting or close scraping, for example.

Slowly the whales pulled ahead and away from us; in the light breeze our pace was too restrictive for them. I envied them the clean simplicity of their life and their playground, and was grateful for the gentleness of their examination of Mingming II. In these waters they must rarely encounter boats of any kind. Their curiosity had been piqued, they had taken a long, peaceable look at us, and carried on unconcerned. They were heading west towards Svenskøya. After a final look at the whalebacks still rising in a regular rhythm, I went about and resumed our course to the north-east.

In those few minutes are voyage had been transformed; the whales had breathed a new life into the enterprise. For the first time I could start to feel the sense and shape of this particular adventure. It was too early to say whether this encounter might represent the defining motif of the whole journey, but I knew that whatever else happened, I now had something way beyond the normal and the expected to grasp on to; that I would go home a happy man. 

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All of Roger’s Mingming books are available on Amazon, or via is website thesimplesailor.com

Oh, and of course we have one signed copy of Mingming II & the Islands of the Ice to give away to a lucky reader! If you’re interested leave a comment below. —Eds

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THE ROGER TAYLOR INTERVIEW

As a young seaman Roger Taylor was lucky to survive a shipwreck on a remote shore aboard the square-rigger Endeavour II. Instead of foreswearing a life at sea, Taylor built a 19-foot boat and twice crossed the Tasman Sea aboard her. More recently he customized an old junk-rigged 21-foot Corribee twin-keeler he calls Mingming and sailed her to Iceland, Rockall, the Faroes—even the Greenland Ice. Taylor has written two books about his adventures, Voyages of a Simple Sailor, and Mingming & the Art of Minimal Ocean Sailing, and in 2010 he was awarded the prestigious Jester Medal for his outstanding contribution to the art of singlehanded sailing.

We understand you had a terrifying experience aboard the Endeavour II that profoundly affected how you now go to sea. Can you tell us what happened?

In early 1971 I was an able seaman aboard the 200 ton three-masted barque Endeavour II en route from Australia to Auckland, New Zealand. We were caught by the tail end of a tropical storm off the northeast coast of New Zealand and trapped between two headlands about 40 miles apart. After a struggle of several days to keep off a mainly rocky lee shore we finally hit a sand bar, in massive seas, at about one o’clock in the morning. We were carried right over the bar and managed to deploy anchors. However a fierce ebb then drove the ship back onto the bar, a couple of miles offshore. The ship stuck on the bar and was pounded for hours by huge breaking seas. The hull was opened up and the ship settled at an angle on the sand. We could not abandon ship as the tide was racing seawards. The conditions were too bad for any kind of external help. It then became a question of whether the ship would break up before the tide turned. Fortunately the ship held together until the flood tide, and we took the decision to abandon. We had a single life raft for the crew of 14. This was manhandled over the side, but the painter parted. The raft was carried away and eventually inflated a hundred yards to leeward, with us still on board ship. All we then had left was a large rubber dinghy, the bottom of which had already been blown out by the storm. We roped ourselves together and went over the side, clinging to what was now a large rubber ring. There was no certainty that we would be carried shorewards. Luckily the wind and currents were in our favour and after an hour or so in the water we were carried through the surf and onto the main beach.

Most people would swear off ocean travel altogether after an experience like that, yet you came back in a 19-foot sailboat. Why so small a boat? Why did you consider her capable?

Yes, I could well have given up the sea after this experience, but I was born by the sea, of a family of seafarers. With so much salt water in my veins I was sure to come back. However the shipwreck was a seminal event, one I was lucky to survive, which taught me many lessons and determined the direction of all my future sea-going. Put briefly, I made the decision, at age 23, that from then on I would only ever go to sea in small, strong, easily-handled yachts, preferably self-built, and sailing singlehanded. I would never again put myself in a position where my life depended on someone else’s seamanship and decision-making. Similarly, I did not want the burden of someone else relying on me. To sail the oceans singlehanded, in a small and simple yacht that you have built yourself, is to distill sea-going to its purest and most satisfying essence.

The shipwreck taught me that there is no inherent safety in size or manpower at sea. What matters are seamanship, strength of construction, and the ability to manage the vessel easily in any conditions. This argues for smaller boats, which, if properly built, are pound for pound stronger than their larger siblings, and infinitely easier to handle in heavy weather. There is also of course an economic argument, as the cost of build and maintenance rises by the cube of the increase in length. From a more philosophic standpoint, particularly in this age of gross over-consumption, there is a lot to be said for achieving the most with the least.

ROC

I began the construction of the 19-foot sloop Roc within about a year of being shipwrecked. She took me three years to complete. Her designer, the New Zealander Brian Donovan, was known for the robustness of his yachts. Even so, as I was building her, I kept in mind images of Endeavour II being pounded to matchwood, and increased all of the designer’s scantlings. A few months prior to launch she was examined by the committee of the 1974 Singlehanded TransTasman Race, in which I was due to compete, and given resounding approval.

Roc subsequently survived many ocean hammerings, including a 180˚ inversion and a Tasman storm in which several larger yachts were lost and a freighter broke its back. She was more than capable for her task!

Tell us a little about your boats, Roc, and Mingming — especially the differences or pros and cons.

Well, I built Roc from the keel up. Her hull was ferro-cement, so she was very heavy for her length, long-keeled and Bermudan sloop rigged. Deck and coachroof were timber, with laminated beams in kauri and mahogany. She had no cockpit (I had not heard of the Pardeys in those days, but was thinking along the same lines as regards structural integrity and maximising below-deck space). She had a sliding main hatch, albeit with double baffles, but no washboards. The aft end of the coachroof was solid mahogany. She had roller reefing for the mainsail, which I could operate from the hatch. To ease foresail changing she had twin forestays, but of course I still had to go forward to make headsail changes. I built a servo-pendulum self-steering gear from timber, ply and dinghy fittings, to a design by the English sailor Bill Belcher. It worked well, but the pendulum broke during our first Tasman crossing, and I had to hand steer for many weeks. Roc was a surprisingly pretty and very plucky little ship. She took her time over getting wherever she had to go, but that never bothered me. The main thing was that she always, always, got there.

Mingming is a total contrast, the product of a much older and wiser head, and overall much more capable than Roc. She is slightly longer than Roc, at 20' 9", fibreglass, and therefore much lighter, and bilge-keeled. She is also junk-rigged. I did not build her from scratch, instead completely remodeling an existing stripped-out hull. Although in principle I would still prefer to build from scratch, I simply do not have the time available for that at the moment. I also think that there are already far too many pleasure boats on this planet, the vast majority of them doing nothing most of the time. Does the world need yet another new hull? It seems to me a nobler enterprise to find a suitable hull mouldering unloved in some backwater and give it a new lease of life. Fibreglass boats of the late sixties to early eighties are well suited to this kind of revival; many production hulls of that era were extremely solidly laid up and have many more years of life in them.

Mingming

Mingming is faster, even easier to handle and, being unsinkable and totally watertight, much more seaworthy than Roc. She does not have Roc’s full standing headroom, but I can stand upright in the hatch, under the spray hood, which is more than adequate.

I have sailed a total of about 26,000 ocean miles, from the Roaring Forties to the high Arctic, in these two yachts, all without an engine. Neither has ever let me down.

We’ve long thought twin and bilge-keelers some of the best candidates for bold small-boat cruisers, in part because they’re built with the English Channel and taking the ground in mind, so they’re often more rugged than the typical plastic trailersailers. Your thoughts?

Mingming is the first bilge-keeled yacht I’ve been to sea in. I did not deliberately choose this form—she was the most suitable hull for what I wanted to do available at the time. I went to sea in her with an open mind, unsure of how she would perform. I am now totally convinced that a bilge-keeler can make as good, if not a better, sea boat than a normal fin-keeled yacht.

Firstly I think the below-waterline part of the hull is stronger. The loads and the reinforcement for these loads are spread over a much wider area. Mingming has encapsulated keels, so there are no problems with keel bolts or leaks.

Secondly twin keels give an easier motion at sea, particularly downwind. There is much less of the pendulum roll of the deep keel. This, when combined with the damping effect of the heavy junk rig, makes for a surprisingly smooth ride. This is well illustrated by the fact the Mingming’s stove is un-gimbaled. I have never yet not been able to cook a meal, and have only once ended up with a bit of dinner on the cabin sole.

Mingming resting on her bilge keels

Thirdly, there is a school of thought, to which I subscribe, that shallow draft boats are actually safer in heavy weather than deep draft boats. To an extent this is counter-intuitive, running contrary to the fixation with having the deepest keel possible. The trouble with deep keels is that, if the boat is pushed sideways by a big sea or breaking wave, it can trip the boat up, effectively capsizing it. A shallow-draft boat, in the same circumstances, just keeps on getting pushed sideways, as it is not producing much resistance low down. I have experienced this many times. With Mingming, this shallow draft is combined with more than enough stability; she has been put on her beam ends a number of times and snaps back up immediately.

Finally, when a landfall is made, it is comforting to know that one can sail in the shallowest of water (Mingming draws 2' 2"), and if necessary dry out safely and comfortably. She can be craned straight on to the ground and trailed a lot more easily.

We’re admirers of the the junk rig—especially for cruising. What is your opinion of the rig now after so many nautical miles.

I would not now go to sea under any other rig. It is marvelously easy to control, beautifully engineered (unlike Western rigs which create massive strains and dangerous stress-points), quiet, forgiving, easily mended and infinitely flexible. Although it is less powerful when hard on the wind than a Bermudan rig, it beats it hands down once the wind is a little bit free. Off the wind it is much better balanced than a Bermudan rig, is more than powerful enough without the use of that most un-seamanlike of sails, the spinnaker, and gybes softly and safely. It seems to work well enough with any old sailcloth, however patched it may be, and however many holes it has in it. With so much support from the multiple battens, multi-part sheeting and lazy jacks, the sail lasts for much longer than a highly stressed Bermudan sail. Most of Mingming’s mainsail is still the 1980 original.

You’ve sailed to Iceland, the Faroes, and through the Greenland ice—hardly milk runs. Tell us about the heavy weather and scary moments. Were there times when you thought, “Ok, this is too much. I shouldn’t be here” ?

I have an unlimited respect for the power of the sea, but it rarely scares me. Fear is largely a result of poor preparation, be it of the boat itself or of the mental attitude of the skipper. A properly prepared boat, handled correctly, should survive most that the open sea can throw at it. The killer is the combination of sea and land, as I found out at an early age. That is why I am happiest and most relaxed the farther I am from land, and why I am an obsessively defensive sailor once on soundings.

Last year I sailed Mingming to the west of Greenland, into the Labrador Sea and the Davis Strait. This meant crossing the area of the North Atlantic where winds and wave heights reach their highest values. Predictably we made our way through a long succession of storms that created seas the likes of which I had only previously seen in the Southern Ocean. Mingming was quite untroubled by all of this. The ultimate objective of the voyage, Cape Dyer on Baffin Island, was only put out of reach when I was tipped out of my bunk and broke a rib, forcing me to turn back 350 miles short.

Sea and ice is potentially the most dangerous combination for any yacht, let alone an engineless singlehander. Nevertheless, it can exercise a powerful attraction. To sail though ice in appropriate conditions is a magical experience, but disaster is potentially only ever a whisker away. Off the east coast of Greenland in 2009 I was forced to turn tail very quickly when I realised that we were bearing down onto an unbroken line of sea ice in worsening weather. This year, when sailing to 80N off the northwest coast of Spitsbergen, the sea was totally ice-free. I still hanker after more ice navigation, nonetheless, and am making plans accordingly.

After this many years of small-boat sailing you must have come to some conclusions about basic design features that make a small-boat particularly well suited to the rigors of ocean sailing. What do you look for?

Well, the first thing to say is that I would never go to sea in a standard production boat without first making serious modifications. This is because there is no design I know of that is both totally watertight and unsinkable. As it happens I am on the look-out for a suitable hull to transform into Mingming II, with a series of very high latitude voyages in mind. My criteria are:

• Light but well-constructed hull, fairly easily driven.

• LOA 23'-24', LWL 19'-20'.

• Displacement < 3000lbs.

• Twin or triple keeled.

• A skegged rudder. This is absolutely fundamental. I would never go to sea with an unprotected and unsupported rudder.

• Suitable, structurally, for conversion to junk rig, if not already junk-rigged.

• Low freeboard, low windage hull of moderate beam.

• Run-down and neglected—I do not want to be paying for a smart interior that I am going to rip out and rebuild anyway.

• Devoid of fancy electronics and all the other paraphernalia of the modern yacht, as these too will all be dispensed with.

• Cockpit and coachroof design and configuration that lend themselves to the modifications I have in mind.

For ice navigation one ideally wants a steel hull, and I have seriously considered this. There is a lovely 23-foot steel cutter for sale here at the moment. However it displaces nearly 8000 pounds on a 20-foot waterline. This then ups the requirements for everything else, especially the size of rig necessary to drive it. It would be almost impossible to make unsinkable. It has a sizable diesel engine too, and while an engine is perhaps necessary for safer ice navigation, there are now greener alternatives that I am considering. I will be sticking with the criteria above.

Any other specific small boat designs you really like?

The romantic in me loves all the little one-off mini-adventurer designs: John Welsford’s Swaggie, the Halfpenny, the Flicka, Matt Layden’s Paradox, Bolger’s Micros, the smaller Benford dories and so on. Some of these are designed for the ocean, some are not, but they all stir the imagination and bring a smile to one’s lips.

In practical terms, as a UK resident looking for a suitable 30 to 40 year-old design to convert to my own specifications, and bearing in mind the bilge-keel requirement, the following designs are of interest:

Hurley 24/70

Elizabethan 23 (only long or drop-keeled)

Snapdragon 747

Kingfisher 26, but too big!

Any of the Folkboat derivatives, but again too big.

It is in fact very difficult to find many designs that fit my criteria; most fall down on one important point or another. The design I am homing in on is the Achilles 24, the nearest thing to a slightly elongated Corribee. This displaces 2600 pounds on a 20' waterline, has a triple keel version with a draft of 3' 3", a 50%+ ballast ratio, low freeboard and a moderate beam. They are well built and reasonably quick, having been designed by Oliver Lee, who also designed the very successful Squib racing keelboat.

We noticed you reduced the cockpit volume on Mingming with a drop-in locker box. What other important modifications did you make to bring her up to your standards of seaworthiness?

Actually the reduction to the cockpit volume is by means of a permanent structural rebuild. The main modifications that I made to Mingming, which I would make to any yacht I was to go to sea in, are:

• Making her unsinkable with the installation of foam filled watertight compartments fore and aft and completely lining the hull and coachroof with 1"; nitrogen-blown closed-cell foam.

• Making her completely watertight with the replacement of the sliding hatch with a watertight escape hatch, and the replacement of the washboards with a solid mahogany bulkhead.

• Installation of a raised bridge deck to give more transverse stiffness.

• Addition of coamings and a small spray hood to give more protection to the main hatch.

• Design and installation of remote controls for the Windpilot self-steering gear.

• Design and installation of a system for raising and lowering the headsails from the hatch. I have always been ambivalent about these sails, and will dispense with them on my next boat. Given the ease of reefing a junk rig, I would rather have an oversize mainsail than the hassle of headsails.

How important do you consider performance—especially speed and pointing ability—for the kind of voyaging you do?

This is a difficult question. I have never been obsessed with speed when making ocean passages. I actually enjoy being at sea and so like the experience to last as long as is reasonably possible. Speed is often cited as a safety factor, but there are huge amounts of nonsense talked about “weather routing” when making ocean passages. The idea that a small boat can either outrun depressions or skirt round high pressure systems is in the main wishful thinking. You probably need to be averaging in excess of 15 knots to have even a remote chance of achieving this. So I do not see speed as a necessary safety factor; I build my safety into the structure and systems of the boat, defensive sailing, and fairly sophisticated storm tactics.

The yacht that advances at a comfortable pace is much less punishing on itself and its skipper and crew; the whole experience is totally different to that of a racing yacht always on the edge when off the wind, and slamming constantly when hard on the wind.

Once well offshore pointing ability becomes almost irrelevant. Small boats have to be sailed a little bit free anyway, in oceanic conditions, to maintain good boat speed and to avoid being stopped dead by steep head seas. I have often endured long periods of headwinds. You do your best, but a few degrees this way or that makes little difference. All you are really doing is waiting for a fairer wind, which will always come eventually.

It is obvious, of course, that the faster yacht will be able to make longer passages, distance-wise, on the same amount of food and water. The relationship between the amount of stores one can carry and the distance that can be covered with those stores is a major factor in planning small-boat ocean voyages. On Mingming I can carry enough food and water to last 100 days, which gives me a theoretical range of over 6000 nautical miles. However I like to have a large safety factor built in, in case I have to resort to a jury rig or jury steering. I therefore view 100 days’ food and water as the basic requirement for a voyage expected to take up to 70 days. So our real range is about 4000 to 4500 nautical miles.

However this does not necessarily hold for summer navigation in the high Arctic, where stable high pressure can significantly reduce daily averages. This is why I am looking to develop a second Mingming specifically for very high latitude sailing. In order to have the range I need, and also the ability to spend more of the limited time available actually in the far North rather than getting there and back, I need about another ½ to ¾ knot of average boat speed. Hence the search for a suitable design with a slightly longer waterline length. Half a knot may not sound much, but 12 miles extra a day over a 70 day voyage is 840 miles, a not inconsiderable distance!

What kinds of heavy-weather techniques have you employed and how successful were they? Lying-a-hull? Drogue?

In the main I avoid lying a-hull. Like most yachts left to their own devices, Mingming takes up an attitude beam on to the seas, the most dangerous position. I prefer to have her either more head to wind, or else running off. For the former I use the junk rig equivalent of heaving-to—sailing to windward with a small amount of mainsail, just feathering into the wind, with the self-steering set at 45 degrees to the apparent wind. This keeps her head up, crabbing slowly to windward, although in heavy conditions she will end up making good about 90 degrees. For running the sequence is:

• Reduce sail

• Run under sail bundle alone, still boomed out.

• Run under bare poles, with the sail bundle lashed amidships.

The ideal attitude for this is about 135 degrees to the apparent wind. If you go too far off there is always a risk of a gybe if a sea comes in from the wrong quarter. If for any reason I really have to be running squarer, the practical limit is about 155 degrees. Beyond this the self-steering is too unstable for safety.

If conditions become too extreme for three above, I launch the Jordan Series Drogue. This is permanently attached to a bridle at the stern, itself attached to two dedicated chain plates on each quarter. Mingming’s drogue has 86 cones on it. I consider it a must-have for ocean sailing; it is a life-saver in survival conditions.

What can you tell us about your self-steering system? We’re guessing you find it indispensable.

I regard my Windpilot Pacific Light self-steering gear as the most important item on board after mast, sails and rudder. It is a phenomenal piece of kit that has taken me through more storms than I care to remember. It just goes on and on and on and really comes into its own in extreme conditions.

Of course no self-steering system should be asked or expected to compensate for poor balance or lazy sail trim. Fortunately Mingming is a beautifully balanced boat—she will sail herself to windward without the tiller lashed, but it is very important to set up the trim and the appropriate amount of weather helm and so on before engaging the self-steering gear. Also the tension on the lines from self-steering gear to tiller is very important. I have developed systems to allow me to adjust this tension from the hatch without having to go on deck.

You refer to yourself as a Simple Sailor. Do you eschew complex systems out of an appreciation of the old ways, to challenge yourself, or because simple systems work better and are easier to maintain? Or is there another reason?

It’s a little bit of all of those, but primarily it’s about total self-sufficiency. Fancy gear is fine until it goes wrong, then what? I loathe the idea of relying on anything that I don’t fully understand, and that I cannot repair quickly and easily using basic tools and materials. So that cuts out most electronics. Reliance on complex systems, I believe, subtly raises anxiety levels at sea. Conversely, knowing that you have strong, simple gear that can be fixed easily can be very comforting when undertaking long ocean passages.

I also think that too much gadgetry can distract from the essentially very simple business of sailing. I prefer to gather my data from direct observation and direct sensation, rather than through digital read-outs. I prefer to engage directly with the sea and the elements, with minimal intermediation. I think that in the long run this makes for better seamanship.

I do not carry any form of long-distance communication, or any tracking device, or an EPIRB, for two reasons: Firstly I want the sea-going experience to be as pure and uncompromised as I can make it. This means total disengagement from land-bound life. Secondly I do not believe that any ocean sailor, out there of his own volition in what is fundamentally a leisure activity, has any right to call for help if things go wrong. To sail into difficult and remote waters, knowing that you are completely on your own, has a superbly mind-concentrating effect on all aspects of preparation. It forces a complete rethink on what constitutes “safety” and so-called “safety equipment.”

What kinds of “gadgets” have you found beneficial?

I carry a couple of hand-held GPS’s, along with my usual celestial navigation gear. Having started ocean sailing long before the advent of GPS, I still find the ability to get an accurate fix in any conditions, at any time, almost miraculous. For offshore work one fix a day is more than enough. The GPS really comes into its own for coastal work in poor conditions.

The only other electronic gadget I carry is a hand-held VHF radio. This has a range of a couple of miles. I use it to call up harbourmasters, and have used it a couple of times to speak with ships and fishing boats.

You so frequently sail in cool weather, what’s your secret for keeping warm?

The first and absolute necessity is a well-insulated boat. Mingming’s hull and coach roof are lined with one inch closed-cell foam, with a layer of carpet on the inside of that. The sealing hatches make her airtight, if required, as well as watertight, therefore minimising heat loss.

With such a small internal area, so well insulated, my own body heat is enough, most of the time, to maintain an adequate cabin temperature.

Obviously wearing warm clothing is the other important element. I always try to give my body a week or two to acclimatise, when sailing north, by not piling on too much layering prematurely. This year (2011) I sailed to 80˚N without having to go near my ultimate top layer of snow-boarding jacket and padded ski trousers.

Are small boats more capable than people generally assume?

Absolutely. The perceived wisdom that size equates to safety is plain wrong. Even the perception that small boats are less “comfortable” could be challenged. This may hold true in port, or if the boat is used for entertaining guests, but in a raw oceanic environment the tight space of a small boat, with everything easily to hand, and with minimal distances that one can be thrown, and with a smaller volume of air to keep warm, and with a generally more “cosy” feel, can make smaller boats surprisingly comfortable.

Of course there are trade-offs, primarily in speed and in range. A small boat will not do for those obsessed with making fast passages; for those, in other words, who are keenest to get off the sea as quickly as possible.

What do you see as the advantages to cruising a smaller boat?

Well, you get all of what I think of as the economies of small scale:

Lower initial outlay

Lower maintenance costs

Lower mooring/berthage costs

Easier trailing

Easier handling and so on

However the real pay-off is in terms of personal satisfaction. It is immensely pleasing to create major voyages through inhospitable waters in yachts primarily conceived for inshore work. The satisfaction is in inverse proportion to the waterline length. To put it crudely, you get a hell of a lot more bounce for your buck with a smaller boat.

Has your voyaging been exclusively singlehanded?

Yes. I have no interest in any other form of ocean sailing.

Did you have a “single-handers psychology” even before you went sailing? Were you always comfortable alone and self-reliant? Any family ashore biting nails awaiting your return?

I’ve always been happy with my own company, which is probably a prerequisite for real singlehanded sailing (by that I mean sailing not directed via e-mail and satellite phones 24/7 by shore crews, weather routers and publicity machines). I have always been a keen naturalist and attracted to wild places, which also helps. I am often asked if I get “lonely.” The emphatic answer is “Never!” I enjoy solitude—a completely different state from loneliness. It is positive, rather than negative, creative rather than destructive. I feel privileged to be able to spend so much time in a kind of communion with the last wilderness and its creatures.

My family does not seem to worry about me when I’m at sea, probably because they have never known anything else. My partner is often asked whether she gets concerned. Her answer is always that she doesn’t, because she sees the level of preparation that goes into every voyage, and because my forty-five years of sea-going suggest I know what I’m doing. As yet I have not had the heart to disabuse her of her misconceptions!

What do you do when you’re not sailing?

The other ten months of the year are spent:

Planning and preparing for the next voyage

Writing up the previous voyage for the next book

Dealing with my foreign publishers

(my books are available in Russian and French)

Touring the country giving talks to yacht clubs

Earning some money (I own an investment management company)

Reading (I never read at sea)

Playing the piano

Going to films, opera, theatre

Socialising with family and friends

You were recently awarded the Jester Medal by the Ocean Cruising Club for an “outstanding contribution to the art of single-handed sailing.” That’s quite an honor.

Yes, an amazing honor which took me completely by surprise. The previous recipient was Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, so I was somewhat humbled to be in such elevated company. I am probably better known than I deserve to be these days because I write books about my voyages. But there are hundreds of amazing sailors who make stupendous voyages in small boats and who just get on with it quietly and modestly. I like to think that the award of the Jester Medal to me was something of a nod in the direction of that kind of sailor.

What adventures are in the future for you?

I want to spend more time in the very high Arctic, hence the plan to create a second version of Mingming. I have been talking with the Russians about sailing to Franz Josef Land in the Barents Sea, and what they will and won’t allow me to do up there. I can’t wait to get back to the whole of the Svalbard group. And there is still unfinished business in the Davis Strait and the hinterland of the Northwest Passage.•SCA•

For more information on Roger and his voyages, visit www.thesimplesailor.com

This interview first appreared in issues #75 and #76