The Untold Voyage: Close Call at Jan Mayen
Roger Taylor and his 20-foot engineless yacht cut it dangerously close at 72º North.
Luckily for Small Craft Advisor readers, one of the world’s finest nautical writers just so happens to sail an engineless 20-foot cruiser, and he’s just released another book of his audacious adventures.
Solo sailor Roger D. Taylor’s (of Ming Ming fame) new book is called The Untold Voyage. The mystery surrounding this story’s delayed telling is addressed on the back cover:
Solo sailor Roger D. Taylor has written may books about his voyages to the Arctic. Some years ago, he made a voyage about which, until now, he has remained silent. What happened on that voyage was so unexpected and so devastating that Taylor threw all his logbooks and records overboard while still in the Greenland Sea. It was a voyage he wanted to erase forever from his memory.
Time has now healed the traumas of that fateful passage, and Taylor has decided that the moment has come to relate what happened. Using just his memory, he has reconstructed the story of that summer cruise to the Far North and the terrible events that blighted it. In telling this untold story, the author hopes to lay to rest the ghosts which have haunted him for so long.
What follows in an extended excerpt from the new book, shared exclusively with Small Craft Advisor readers. In addtion, Roger has kindly given us one signed copy of the new book to giveaway to a lucky paid subscriber. If you’d like to be entered in the giveway, please leave a comment in the commments section below. But if you plan to purchase a copy of the book—don’t delay as Roger is offering signed pre-order copies right now. —Eds
The extraordinary island of Jan Mayen lies at 72° North in the north-west corner of the Norwegian Sea. In this extract from his latest book, The Untold Voyage, solo sailor Roger D. Taylor describes a brief but chastening close call under the towering cliffs of the island’s volcano, Mount Beerenberg. The moral of the story is that, in the remote Arctic anyway, twenty-foot engineless yachts are best kept well offshoreSolo
CLOSE CALL AT JAN MAYEN
Jan Mayen has always exceeded my expectations. On every visit I have uncovered more aspects of its charm and power. Each time I sail the island’s coast, the spell it has over me grows stronger. It is difficult to explain this attraction. Perhaps it partly lies in the variety and harmony of the island’s physical form, partly in the unlikeliness of its great peak surrounded by nothing but deep, deep ocean, partly in its remoteness and, until recently, its inaccessibility. There are all these physical aspects, yes, but there is something more that I find almost impossible to pin down and verbalise. The island satisfies an indefinable yearning. There is something immeasurably beautiful and sad in its timelessness. It evokes wonder and despair in equal measure. It is a reminder of both the age of the world and of the brevity of our passage through it. When sailing close to Jan Mayen, I feel bigger, stronger, somehow enhanced by the solidity of its mass, but at the same time I am overwhelmed by a sharper sense of my own insignificance and my own mortality.
This visit was no different. In fact, with Mount Beerenberg now dominating the north-east horizon, a towering mass of brilliant white, I sensed all the usual conflicting reactions with an even greater acuteness. It was almost unbearable to witness the strange and inexplicable beauty of this wild place and to feel myself more, and less, growing and diminishing, at one and the same time.
The low central isthmus that divides the narrow southern ridge from the huge circular base of Mount Beerenberg creates a shallow scallop on both the east and west sides of the island. I had set a course that would bring us in close to the north-west shoulder of the volcano, and so for a while we edged away from the land as we crossed this indent in the coastline. Now astern were some of the features I knew so well from my previous southwards run down this coast, in particular the Kvalrossen headland with its rounded offshore rocks. I assumed that Kvalrossen is a version of the Norwegian hvalrossen—walruses (the English word being derived from the Norwegian) but had no idea whether the headland was so called because of the whaleback shape of the outlying rocks, or whether the beautiful little bay to the south of the headland was once home to these magnificent creatures.
As the land started to rise again into the foothills of the volcano, I could see once again the rock formation, on the top of a line of cliffs, which had so puzzled me last time. From the north one has the impression of a perfectly sculpted cube, so regular in shape that it looks man-made. This illusion does not hold so well from the south and I remembered with amusement that for a few minutes the outcrop had fooled me completely.
In any event, my eye was now drawn to the great mass ahead, devoid of cloud and illuminated by what must have been an afternoon sun. Here was a Mount Fuji, or a Mount Taranaki, thrusting straight out of the depths. From ocean base to summit the mountain rises about fourteen thousand feet. The icy peak, with the rim of its volcano defined by a central flat section, was impressive enough, but what has always overawed me are the monstrous shoulders of the mountain rising almost vertically from the sea. We were now approaching these shoulders. With the wind still holding steadily from the west, I gave myself permission to sail in as close as I possibly dared.
The air above our wake was now alive with the criss-crossing flightpaths of hundreds and hundreds of fulmars. The sea too was spread with scores of bobbing birds. These fulmars had the mucky grey plumage of the northern variety, rather than the pure white heads and underparts of their southern cousins. The birds stuck with us hour after hour, as they always do, their wildness and inscrutability and incessant motion a counterpoint to the dark, immobile cliffs looming ever more deliciously overhead. We were angling gently in towards this great wall of rock.
As a precaution, should I need to change course quickly, I now disconnected the self-steering gear and took over the steering myself, using tiller lines that led to the hatchway. With M. under my direct control, I would have a better feel for how she was behaving and sense any change in the prevailing conditions much more rapidly. By sailing in so close to such a potentially hostile shoreline, I was taking the kind of risk that I usually avoided. It went against all my basic principles of good seamanship, especially as it was in one sense completely unnecessary. Yes, strictly speaking, or at least from a purely navigational point of view, it was unnecessary, but I was nonetheless compelled to do it. This compulsion arose from another need: to come face to face, literally and uncompromisingly, with the very essence of bleakness. To sail right in under that wall of rock, at the very ends of the earth, would terrify, exhilarate and refresh my aging spirit. It had to be done. It was possibly, I thought at the time, a final rite of passage, a last glorious reassertion of my own wayward nature.
I eased M. off the wind a few degrees more so we were now heading straight for the western extremity of the cliffs ahead. The base of Mount Beerenberg describes a gentle curve. Further around the curvature ahead lay the glaciers, cutting down from the summit in a north-westerly direction.
At this point we were probably still a mile or so offshore, but this distance was now reducing rapidly. One mile may seem, to a landsman, a considerable margin, but after several weeks of sailing the open ocean, to be so close to such an impossibly tall and implacable monolith, with the waves breaking on its base now visible, was more than disconcerting. I had to fight to overcome my natural aversion to sailing without good cause into a potentially dangerous position. Like the fool that I am, I carried on, not simply throwing caution to the wind, but risking everything in the process.
I admit that at that point I felt pleased with myself. For once I had overcome my inbred defensiveness and was about to do something bold, heroic, exceptional. I was thinking about the photographs and videos I would be able to take as we skirted the cliffs just a few yards offshore. My mind was already composing exquisite little phrases that would capture the wonder and drama of the moment.
We kept on in. I could now hear the surf breaking on the unforgiving rock at the base of the cliffs. My fear had almost gone, subsumed into the madcap deliciousness of the moment. The wind still held, and the fulmars still wheeled around us in their thousands, dumb witnesses to the unfolding spectacle. I may even have wished for a more appreciative crowd of onlookers; eyes more cognisant of what a brave chap I was, what an intrepid navigator.
We kept on in, and in short order two unrelated events changed the complexion of the day. There was a metallic bang aft, and the mainsail swung right out to leeward, spilling its wind and leaving us rolling helplessly. As I checked aft and aloft, trying to work out what had happened, I saw that my little masthead wind indicator was gyrating uncertainly. The wind was changing.
Bloody hell!
One of the blocks for the mainsheet, the long and complex line that controls the angle of the mainsail, had failed. It had parted company with its attachment and was now high up in the air. Its departure had allowed the mainsheet to run right out. This had happened to me once before, on the way to the Azores, also at an unpropitious moment. To repair the problem would take some time. I would have to lower the mainsail, dig out a new block from my stores, attach it aft and re-reeve the mainsheet. If I were lucky, I could do this in fifteen minutes, but with each swell carrying us closer to the cliffs, that may not be enough time.
Bloody hell!
I thought about the problem for a few more seconds and decided on a different provisional solution. I hauled in the mainsheet. As I expected, it was now no longer controlling the two upper battens of the mainsail, so the top of the sail was falling away to leeward, providing little, if any, drive. To counteract this, I eased the mainsheet and the mast parrels—the lines which control the set of the sail at its forward end—and hauled up the mainsail so that all six panels were set, then sheeted it in hard. It was an ugly sail, with a huge twist in its now liberated upper section, but the lower panels were still under the control of the mainsheet and would, I hoped, provide us with enough power to sail clear of the shore. Once safely away from the land I could make the full repair.
Had the wind held, it would have been relatively easy to edge away from the cliffs under this makeshift rig, but I was now paying the price for sailing in so close. Despite it being an onshore wind, the proximity of the huge rockface was setting the flow of the air all awry.
Yes, I had got myself into not just an almighty mess, but a perilous one, too. The wind died. Short-lived gusts came in from any old direction, backwinding the mainsail and leaving us gyrating helplessly on the shore-bound swell. I considered manning the oars, to see if I could keep us off the rocks by rowing, but I knew from a previous episode in an Icelandic fjord that I would not achieve anything except total physical exhaustion. In full cruising trim, still with most of her stores aboard, it was impossible to move M. in a seaway.
For the best part of an hour, I worked at the tiller and the mainsheet, trying to keep us in some sort of sailing configuration, to capture and retain some drive seawards, or at the very least parallel with the coast. From time to time little puffs of wind came in from a beneficial direction, giving us a few yards of positive movement, but in the main there was nothing but a useless, maddeningly gutless series of rotating eddies. We were well and truly stuck.
There was no question that we were being carried closer into the cliff-face, but watching the curve of the land ahead, I realised that we were also moving to the north-east, more or less parallel with the coast. I had no idea whether this movement was caused by tide, or current, or both; nor did I care. All I knew was that this flow of water might well save us from an ignominious and, in this instance, well-deserved fate. The land ahead angled more sharply to the east-north-east. There was at least a chance that the current would propel us on in the direction we were now moving, away from the breakers I could now hear pounding on the shore.
In fact, it was the wind that saved us. As abruptly as it had dropped away, the breeze suddenly resumed normal service, nice and fresh and still from the west. Within a few seconds we were careering forwards under our misshapen rig, carrying too much sail despite its inefficiency. Never mind that. The water was now creaming joyfully under our lee as I hardened up to a beam reach that had us heading at one and the same time in those two most desirable of directions: due north and away from land.
As we sped off, the first of the mighty glaciers, the Weyprecht, appeared to our east. I had previously sailed in close to this glacier and had intended, this time, to push in right to the very limit. Well, I had once again learned my lesson, and was now nothing but deliriously happy to see it falling rapidly away on our port quarter. I was done with the bold and the heroic.
Here is the back cover description of the book:
“One of the best sailing writers on this planet.”
Keiran Flatt, Editor, Yachting Monthly
‘There was, however, one voyage… and what happened on that voyage was so far beyond the compass of what I thought possible that I have never, until this moment, said or written a single word about it.’
Solo sailor Roger D. Taylor has written may books about his voyages to the Arctic. Some years ago, he made a voyage about which, until now, he has remained silent. What happened on that voyage was so unexpected and so devastating that Taylor threw all his logbooks and records overboard while still in the Greenland Sea. It was a voyage he wanted to erase forever from his memory.
Time has now healed the traumas of that fateful passage, and Taylor has decided that the moment has come to relate what happened. Using just his memory, he has reconstructed the story of that summer cruise to the Far North and the terrible events that blighted it. In telling this untold story, the author hopes to lay to rest the ghosts which have haunted him for so long.
The book is available in digital and paperback formats from most online booksellers or from thesimplesailor.com (signed paperback pre-orders still available). •SCA•
Be sure to leave a comment below to be entered in our giveaway, where a comment will be chosen by random number generator. —Eds
Some time ago I read some of Roger Taylor's comments on MingMing and the rig. It is amazing that one has the courage to navigate in the far north just sail and muscle. Generally his rig is one that I can understand, having one somewhat like it on my 25 ft Aleutka hull. However I am off the Texas coast and have much different weather considerations. I can also understand the drive to do something "foolish" getting too close to danger. In each case we are lucky to have survived. More power to him.
As a former Dracombe lugger owner I'd love to hear the entire story.