Voyages Of A Simple Sailor

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 third book singlehanded sailor Roger 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.

The book covers three extraordinary voyages in the tiny yacht Mingming, carrying on from where Voyages of a Simple Sailor left off.

Far to the north of Russia, across the cold waters of the Barents Sea, lies the desolate archipelago known as Franz Josef Land.

The book covers three extraordinary voyages in the tiny yacht Mingming, carrying on from where Voyages of a Simple Sailor left off.

Christian Beamish, a former editor at The Surfer’s Journal, envisioned a low-tech, self-reliant exploration for surf along the coast of North America, using primarily clothes and instruments available to his ancestors, and the 18-foot boat he would build by hand in his garage. How the vision met reality – and how the two came to shape each other – places Voyage of the Cormorant in the great American tradition of tales of life at sea, and what it has to teach us.