Roger Taylor’s website begins with a position that sounds almost hostile to the modern marine catalog: ocean sailing has become needlessly complicated, bigger boats are not automatically better, and simplicity is a serious design choice rather than a lack of equipment.
Taylor is the skipper associated with Mingming, a small junk-rigged Corribee, and later Mingming II. The site has been online in this form since at least 2007 and grew into a substantial collection of voyage reports, articles, photographs, video clips, heavy-weather material, whale encounters, and books.
The best part is that the site does not merely tell you Taylor sailed small boats into serious water. It preserves the voyage records.
His 2018 account, for example, follows Mingming II north from Whitehills on Scotland’s Moray Firth toward Svalbard and Franz Josef Land. Eighteen days and roughly 1,200 miles out, he closed the coast of Prins Karl’s Forland. He later passed north of Ross Island at roughly 80 degrees 50 minutes north and pushed farther east before turning back near 81 degrees 15.3 minutes north, where current and pack-ice risk made continuing a bad bargain.
This is not marina lifestyle writing. The site includes fog, unsounded water, Force 9 weather, bare-poles running, ice glare, navigation decisions, and the practical reasoning behind using a small, stiff, watertight boat.
The older pages also reach much farther back than the website itself. Taylor includes photographs of building his first ocean cruiser, the 19-foot Roc, in the early 1970s; of Roc after storm damage during the 1974 Singlehanded Trans-Tasman Race; and of his time aboard the ill-fated three-masted barque Endeavour II in 1971.
That gives the site an unusual quality. It is simultaneously a personal homepage, a sailing philosophy, a primary-source voyage archive, and a bridge between pre-Web experience and Web-era self-publishing.
For a modern webmaster, there is another lesson hiding in the rigging. The site does not need elaborate software to remain valuable. Its useful unit is still the same one the early Web was excellent at: a person with unusual experience writing down what happened and linking the photographs beside it.
Taylor says the website will never be finished. After nearly two decades, that may be the most old-Web sentence on it.