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The FitzRoy Press - D. Taylor Roger

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139 pages

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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.

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Memoir

Philosophie et théologie

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Publié par	The FitzRoy Press
Date de parution	17 mai 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780955803550
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0270€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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VOYAGES OF A SIMPLE SAILOR
ROGER D. TAYLOR
VOYAGES OF A SIMPLE SAILOR
F
THE FITZROY PRESS
Published by The FitzRoy Press 2008
F
The FitzRoy Press 5 Regent Gate Waltham Cross Herts EN8 7AF
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part (other than for purposes of review), nor may any part of this book be stored in an information retrieval system without written permission from the publisher.
Copyright 2007 Roger D Taylor
ISBN 978-0-9558035-0-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Publishing management by Troubador Publishing Ltd, Leicester, UK Printed in the UK by The Cromwell Press Ltd, Trowbridge, Wilts.
This book is dedicated to my father, Angus Taylor, who at eighty-seven years of age can still keep us enthralled with his own tales of the sea.
In order to minimise the cost and ecological impact of this book, colour photographs have been omitted. Galleries of photographs linked to this text can be found at www.thesimplesailor.com
Contents
Preface
PART ONE
SHIPWRECK
PART TWO
CAPSIZE
PART THREE
CALMS
Preface
No, when I go to sea, I go as a simple sailor Herman Melville, Moby Dick
The first two of these three voyages took place many years ago. In the intervening decades people would often suggest I write about them. The time never seemed right. I never felt ready. I thought I would probably never do it. But, in the strange way that life s patterns assert themselves, the time suddenly arrived when I not only felt ready to revisit and write down these experiences, I felt thoroughly compelled to do so. All of a rush I wanted to get it all down on paper. Maybe the years of quiet distillation in some deep inner vault had brought the memories and images to their proper maturity. Maybe they had been waiting for the right moment to assert themselves, to be decanted from those barrels lying long immobile and untapped in some dark corner of my mind, to be brought up, poured into a clear fresh glass and held up for examination against the piercing, uncomfortable daylight of this new century.
All action needs a catalyst, and there is no doubt that it was my most recent voyage in Mingming that acted as such. The preparation and conduct of that little adventure, the third described in this book, flowed directly from the ocean experiences of over thirty years ago. I scarcely realised it at the time. The rush and excitement of finding and rebuilding a suitable small yacht, and sailing her, engine-less, down to Plymouth, all while I was running my business, precluded much considered thinking about how the present linked with the past. It was only later that I started to reflect on the logical threads that ran through all three voyages, how they all made sense of each other. Having seen the sense of it all, I realised that I could, at last, write about it
PART ONE
SHIPWRECK
I have scarcely found a semblance of sleep in the heaving forepeak when a scream, terrifying for its naked conviction, comes down the hatch - All hands on deck and bring your lifejackets The words force themselves through my shell of semi-consciousness. They reverberate in my unwilling head, which knows already what they mean but that, for just one heartbeat, attempts to ignore them, to forget them, to pretend they never existed. Not possible. It is not possible to ignore them. Nor is it possible to ignore their meaning, nor their implication. There is no escaping them. At the second heartbeat I am fully awake and my stomach lurches. This, I know, is finally it. For three days, since weathering the North Cape of New Zealand, we have been fighting for survival. Storm force winds from the north-east, the leftovers of a tropical storm that has wound its way down from the Pacific Islands, have swept in and pinned us between North Cape to the north, and Cape Karikari to the south. We are in the classic shipwreck position of the square-rigger - embayed between two headlands with an onshore gale and no way to sail out. Unless conditions change, there is only one outcome - the ship will be driven onto the hostile shore to leeward. The land is now close to, somewhere ahead in the blackness under our lee bow. We cannot tack ship in these conditions. To wear round on to a southerly tack would lose us another mile or so; bring us a mile closer to our certain demise. By midnight, an hour ago, when my watch turned in, grateful for some respite from the searing wind and rain, we knew there was little hope. Nothing overt was said, but the ship s complement was tense and sombre. Each man, and the one woman, had retreated to his or her own private contemplation of what now seemed inevitable. Little was said apart from the barest necessities for running the ship. The usual banter and backchat had evaporated. We were grim, deadly so. A simple and unvoiced question preoccupied every one of us - will I be alive by dawn? Or will I be dead? And if I am dead, what will be the manner of my dying?
1
I was living and working in Cairns, North Queensland, when I first read about the Endeavour II . By then I was twenty-three years old and was fully embarked on a life of adventure. At age eight I had run away from home to seek my fortune. An empty stomach brought me home by teatime. At ten I first went to sea, in a ten-foot dinghy. The owner and skipper was my best friend David. We sailed out into the tidal waters of the Dee estuary. This was strictly forbidden. We were supposed to be sailing within the confines of the marine lake. For the first time I saw a clear horizon from the deck of a small yacht - Liverpool Bay, where the great ships come and go to places beyond imagination. An inexpressible yearning was born, a need, a compulsion which haunts me to this day.
At age fifteen, by which time my long-suffering parents had accepted that their injunctions held little sway, I had hitchhiked around Western Europe. A head-on collision in the south of France had left me hospitalised in Nice for a week. Battered but undaunted, I carried on through northern Italy and Switzerland. The red mercurochrome that had been used to treat the lacerations on my face worked wonders in stopping sympathetic drivers. At seventeen, prior to going to university, I hitchhiked across Europe and Turkey to Iran, Iraq and Syria. This was a thirteen thousand mile round trip. I took 40 with me and came home with 4 in my pocket. A little money was made on the way selling my blood in Greece and street busking in Istanbul.
After graduating I set off again, this time with a girlfriend. We hitchhiked across Europe, Turkey and Iran and on to Afghanistan, over the Khyber Pass to Pakistan and then by special train (there was a war on at the time) to India. We took respite from the teeming streets of Old Delhi with a trip up to the old colonial hill station of Mussoorie, in the Himalayan foothills.
Next stop was Bangkok, and escape from that noisy city to the calm and charm of Pattaya Beach on the Gulf of Siam. Pattaya is now a notorious destination for so-called sex tourists, a metropolitan nightmare of bars, hotels and brothels selling every kind of sleaze to every kind of sleaze-bag. In the late sixties it was close to idyllic - a long curve of empty white sand, on the one side a clear turquoise sea, on the other groves of palms and bamboo hiding teak-built Thai houses on stilts. The idyll was offset, however, by the US Army Rest and Recreation Centre at the north end of the beach. The Vietnam war was in full swing. GI s were sent here on battle leave. We got to know some of the US soldiers and had access to some of their facilities - in particular their fleet of sailing dinghies.
On we went to Singapore, where my long hair marked me out as an undesirable. Our passports were confiscated and we were given just a few days to appear at one of their offices with a paid ticket out of the island state, when our passports would be returned to us. This put paid to the idea of trying to find passage on a merchant ship to the Philippines. The last of our money bought a flight to Perth, Western Australia.
Perth was booming. The already buoyant Western Australian mining industry had been given another boost by the discovery of uranium in the north-west. Downtown Perth was a mass of new high-rise office blocks under construction. I got a job as a carpenter s labourer, then graduated to carpenter and soon leading-hand carpenter. The money was good and we bought a keelboat - a twenty-one foot half-decker called Sirius. For a season we raced every weekend on the Swan River.
After fifteen months or so I left Perth on my own and travelled by train and ship to Tasmania. I fancied a change from dirty manual work, so applied for a job as a clerk in the Police Department. Instead, my interviewers, who evidently held some wider civil service brief, decided that I would be better employed as a schoolteacher. I was sent out to New Norfolk High School, about twenty-five miles up the Derwent River from Hobart, and was given two weeks teacher training. This consisted of sitting in the back of various classrooms watching how it was done, after which I was given a full timetable teaching English and Social Studies. I was well-versed in English, but the latter was mainly Australian history, about which I knew absolutely nothing. Fortunately my pupils, in the main a bunch of little terrors from the darker Tasmanian hinterland, knew even less. I loved and often visited the western coast of Tasmania. Here, impenetrable rainforest and towering peaks spill down to windswept beaches where the surf, meeting land for the first time thousands of miles from the coasts of South America, and driven on by the relentless westerlies of the Roaring Forties, starts breaking and pounding a good mile out to sea
I taught for six months, keeping a page or two ahead of my students in the history textbook. Then I took the car ferry to Melbourne, and traded in my Min