Tag: sailing

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Ancient Web: The Simple Sailor Kept Ocean Voyaging Small

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.

Visit The Simple Sailor

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.

Read the voyages and sailing notes at The Simple Sailor

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Ancient Web: This Boating Guide Was Tested in Netscape 2.0 for Unix

Geoff Kuenning’s boating page has one of the better compatibility statements left on the old Web: it was tested with Netscape Navigator 2.0 for Unix. Nearly thirty years later, the page is still doing what it was built to do—helping somebody remember a pile of rules that are much easier to recall when they rhyme.

Visit Definitions and Mnemonics for Sailors and Powerboaters

Kuenning explains that he assembled the material as a beginner rather than presenting himself as a maritime authority. That distinction matters. The page is essentially a public set of study notes covering navigation lights, sound signals, buoyage, collision regulations, compass work, weather, boat terminology, and the other information that starts accumulating when somebody learns to operate a boat safely.

The memorable parts are the mnemonics.

A vessel showing red over red is remembered as “Red over Red / This boat is dead.” A trawler becomes “Green over White / Trawling tonight.” Five short horn blasts become “Blast quick five / To stay alive.” And the familiar American buoyage reminder survives as “Red Right Returning.”

These are not offered as magical replacements for knowing the rules. Kuenning explicitly warns that memory aids are no substitute for the official regulations and proper seamanship. That makes the page more useful, not less: it knows exactly what kind of document it is.

The copyright dates are 1996 and 1997, and the page permits nonprofit and educational reproduction with attribution. Its construction is equally period-specific. There is no application shell, no cookie banner, no account, and no script required to reveal the next definition. It is a long, organized reference page designed to be read, searched, printed, and linked.

That old information architecture aged unusually well. A modern webmaster looking at it can see why. The headings describe the material. The text carries the information. Links lead somewhere useful. Almost nothing stands between the reader and the reason the page exists.

For historians of the Web, the Netscape note dates the culture as neatly as a browser screenshot. For boaters, some of the material remains recognizable because navigation rules and the human need for dumb little rhymes have both proved more durable than browser wars.

Pages like this are why the CacheRat 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list is interesting beyond nostalgia. An ordinary personal study aid can survive long enough to become both a usable reference and a specimen of early Web publishing.

Read the complete boating mnemonics reference