Roger D. Taylor – författare

Roger Taylor follows on from his highly praised Voyages of a Simple Sailor, taking us on three more extraordinary voyages aboard his junk-rigged Corribee Mingming. This simple, rugged 21’ yacht, developed and honed for effortless single-handed ocean sailing, goes where bigger and more sophisticated craft fear to tread. Iceland, Rockall, the Faroes, Jan Mayen, the Greenland ice, with an interlude to the Azores, are all encompassed in these enthralling adventures. Roger has a unique sailing partnership with his yacht Mingming, using her to develop his ideas on simple, harmonious voyaging.

In his third book singlehanded sailor Roger D. Taylor ventures to even more remote seas aboard his tiny junk-rigged yacht Mingming. The first voyage, across the North Atlantic to Baffin Island, is curtailed when Taylor is injured in a storm in the Davis Strait. Unwilling to sail on into the ice with a broken rib, he turns round and re-crosses the Atlantic to Plymouth, completing a non-stop voyage of over 4000 miles. The second voyage takes the reader to Jan Mayen, Spitsbergen and on to 80°North, virtually as close as it is possible to sail to the North Pole. During these two voyages Taylor spends well over four months at sea, observing and reflecting on the sea itself, its wildlife, its attraction, and man’s uneasy relationship with it.

Aged just 23, and already set on a life of adventure, Roger Taylor signed up as an able seaman on the square-rigger Endeavour II, bound from Australia to New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. It was the realisation of a boyhood dream. The dream was cruelly shattered when the ship was caught in a fierce tropical storm off the coast of northern New Zealand. For several days, the young crew fought in horrific conditions to keep the ship off the hostile cliffs to leeward. Their efforts were in vain. Nothing could save the ship as it was driven towards the shore. At one in the morning the ship finally struck land. With mountainous seas and storm force winds there was little chance of survival. Death seemed inevitable; the ordeal over. In fact it had hardly begun...Having narrowly survived this formative experience, Roger resolved that from then on he would only ever go to sea on his own terms, single-handed and in small, easily manageable yachts. He built the 19’ ocean cruiser Roc and sailed her in the 1974 Trans Tasman Single-handed Yacht Race, only the sixth ever solo ocean race. In the early part of this voyage Roc was rolled in huge seas, the main steering was damaged and the self-steering smashed beyond repair. Roger hand-steered for nearly 30 days, only to encounter one of the worst storms recorded off the east coast of Australia.Roger went on to sail many thousands of ocean miles, all the while refining his simple approach. This book is a distillation of over 50 years of sailing experience, describing small-boat voyaging from a unique and deeply considered perspective.

In his fourth book, singlehanded sailor Roger D. Taylor takes us once more to the remote corners of the Arctic. Sailing his newly-created yacht Mingming II, Roger ventures into the Baring Sea and explores the islands of north-eastern Svalbard. During the 55-day voyage to waters seldom sailed in, he encounters everything from walruses to inquisitive humpback whales to massive ice cliffs, and nearly rescues a beautiful Russian girl from Bear Island. On his way back he makes his third visit to the island of Jan Mayen, deep in the Norwegian Sea, and there fulfils a long-held ambition. Acutely observational and well-laced with Taylor’s wry humour, the book is as much an exploration of what is possible with one man, one simple boat and one home-made sail, as a journey to some of the planet’s bleakest and most beautiful islands.

Far to the north of Russia, across the cold waters of the Barents Sea, lies the desolate archipelago known as Franz Josef Land. Hidden away still further to the north and west of those islands is one of the most inaccessible and least known seas on this planet – the Queen Victoria Sea. In his fifth book of voyages, Roger Taylor describes his successful attempt to sail into those lonely and usually icebound waters.On the way he weathers the most northerly point of the Svalbard islands before sailing due east along 81°North to the north-west coast of Franz Josef Land. Pack-ice would normally render such a route impossible.This voyage, which linked the endpoints of Taylor’s two previous Arctic voyages to the north-west and north-east of Svalbard, marks the culmination of nearly fifty years of small-boat ocean sailing.Taylor has been described in the yachting press as ‘one of the best sailing writers on this planets’ and ‘the best-balanced writer you will ever read’. His books combine vivid description with deep reflection, humour, an intimate knowledge of ocean species and a lifetime of practical sea-going experience.