To be published in partnership with Sirene Journal.

It was a relatively warm day at 73 degrees North. Trevor Robertson stood on the deck of his cutter-rigged sailboat as an Arctic fox balanced on the stern. He had fed the fox each morning with leftovers of rice and beans, and in return this local had adopted him as a worthy winter companion. The pair weren’t afloat; with their sailboat frozen into a remote polar bay, they were slowly being dragged deeper as the ice thickened. Robertson and the fox were now features of the icescape, and would remain so for as long as the Arctic indulged its dominant mood – winter.  

This was Robertson’s third time spending a winter in the polar regions. His first overwintering expedition had been in antarctica, where he faced a 5500-mile single-handed voyage across the Southern Ocean, one of the stormiest on earth. ‘Nothing I have seen in a lifetime of sailing compares to those breaking seas of the forties and fifties south latitude’, Robertson recalls in his blog, ‘there is a momentary silence as a bigger than usual wave blankets the wind, then a hiss turning to a low roar of the breaking sea…followed by a mighty crash as it hits’.

 Sailing north is the easier option. Once he arrived, Robertson sought out a suitable cove for overwintering: shallow enough to stop large ice drifting in, yet deep enough so the vessel does not hit the bottom once the ice drags it down; sheltered enough to avoid the full force of the surrounding ocean and small enough to run lines to shore for mooring, yet not prone to flooding from streams further inland. ‘If possible’, says Robertson, ‘the bay will have interesting wildlife…and a sunny southern outlook’, but in the polar regions survival comes well before comfort.

Once frozen in, the art of overwintering becomes a balance between defying death and the good housekeeping. Simple tasks, like making a quick breakfast, develop extra steps once the temperature falls so far. Each morning, Robertson would venture out to the nearest iceberg and hack off a lump of ice for his coffee and porridge. He then found adventure between the pages of a book, sitting down to read a spy novel by defrosting the paper with the palm of his hand, and speed-reading the action scenes before they re-froze.

But this harmony could not last, and beneath an icy veil, the hostility of one of the world’s last wild places remained. When summer returned, Robertson’s sailboat would be cast from the ice and forced to become an ocean-going vessel once again. ‘It requires a sense of confidence, maybe arrogance’ Robertson says. If he had chosen the wrong bay to freeze into all those months earlier, he risked his only shelter being crushed or flooded in the process of escaping the ice. This give and take is paradigmatic of the polar regions; by embracing it, Robertson is quietly one of the most exceptional sailors of our time.

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Raised in Western Australia, Robertson grew up among strong story-telling traditions. ‘When I was a young bloke working in the bush, we’d sit around the fire at the end of the day and tell tales’, he recalls to me. It is perhaps unsurprising that this story-telling spirit quickly found its way into our conversations. I first spoke to Robertson when he was in Panama, far from the frozen ends of the world, he told me he was preparing to the traverse the canal and enter the Pacific Ocean. By tomorrow he would be on passage to Tahiti and out of email range for three months; I was fortunate to catch him.

In these early conversations, I was often struck by how calmly Robertson would recount the very dangerous situations he found himself in. ‘Either I’m getting old or this boat is’, he joked one evening, ‘I seem to have more gear failures at sea than I used to – 42 days Panama to Mangareva, with a broken inner forestay and shredded staysail’. Even the months he had spent alone in an unheated sailboat, lost in his shell of snow, seemed to be perfectly ordinary to him. ‘Yeah, there are some challenges, but there is an attractive side to a challenge as well’, he went on, with the same calm confidence that found its way into all of his replies. 

It's hard to exaggerate just how isolated Robertson is during his overwintering expeditions. Not only does he avoid small settlements, because to do otherwise would ‘come at the cost of missing the experience of the remote’, but Robertson is also strongly against carrying an EPIRB device to call for emergency assistance. Some in the sailing world would consider this reckless, but for Robertson, the ability to call for help carries with it an obligation to abide by the rules of the helper, and the increased risk is a small price to pay to sail freely.

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I had first heard of Robertson’s overwintering expeditions while reading his online blog, the modern outlet for his story-telling impulse. The blog is named for his sailboat, the Iron Bark, and though it is filled with detailed posts about howhe sails to the poles, he says surprisingly little on everyone’s favourite question – why? I had hoped that in my discussions with Robertson I might get an insight into why some people risk their lives for this daring art.

The polar explorer, Ernest Shackleton, wrote that people go out into these void spaces of the world for a love of adventure, a thirst for scientific knowledge, or because they are drawn away by the lure of little voices. Robertson could very easily be called the adventurous type. He bought his first sailboat from a ‘cheap old bastard who wouldn’t spend any money on proper fastenings’ and went on to complete his first circumnavigation of the globe mostly single-handed. 

On the phone from Tonga, he told me the story of how he was shipwrecked in the Caribbean after running aground on the rocks: ‘I was sailing near the reef and dosed off at the wrong moment, I got woken up by the unmistakable crunch of the hull hitting something hard’. With his boat quickly sinking, Trevor was left with no other choice but to swim ashore with only the clothes on his back, a wet passport, and five East Caribbean dollars. ‘Well, better go again’, he thought to himself, not one to dwell on what he cannot change.

On another occasion, Robertson was caught in the crossfire of a military coup in Yemen. Too quick for him to react, gunboats had engaged tanks in the harbour of Aden where his sailboat sat. ‘Not much you can do at the time other than watch it happen’, he told me, ‘people sometimes romanticise intertribal warfare, but it quickly loses its lustre when it’s fought with Kalashnikovs and MIG-23s. For months afterwards I was digging shell fragments out of the topside of the boat’. At the time, Robertson had been sailing with his Canadian girlfriend who was in town when the fighting broke out, he recalled, ‘she was severely lacking a sense of humour when she returned’.

And yet, Trevor seems to have been driven more by curiosity than swash-buckling fantasies. As a young man who grew up ‘well on the way to nowhere’, a sailboat seemed to be the ideal method to see what the world was really like. Boats were more expensive in real terms back then, but once you had one you could come and go as you pleased. The adventures were really just an accident. In one blog post about his voyage to Antarctica, Robertson writes: ‘Most of what are called adventures are the result of poor preparation and the rest are due to poor execution, and I wanted no adventures’

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Another lure of the higher latitudes is the pursuit of scientific knowledge. Robertson is no scientist, but for what it’s worth, he kept a daily record of the species he observed at the poles. The first of his Antarctic neighbours were the 4000 gentoo penguins that inhabited a nearby rockery. ‘You smelt them before you saw them’, he joked, ‘penguin poo is quite potent’. Robertson watched from the front row of a David Attenborough documentary as the penguin’s numbers slowly dwindled during the winter months. Once spring came, he was able to watch through the port holes as a group of Weddle seals raised six blotchy young on the ice beside the Iron Bark, and he listened as the snow petrels and sheathbills filled the quiet space between the icy slopes.

Robertson knew the scientific establishment wouldn’t take much notice of his findings, after all, he suggested, ‘the scientific community in Antarctica have an unfortunately precarious ego’. Nonetheless, he lit up as he recounted tales of fin whales and orca and crabeater seals. For Robertson, seeing wildlife meant more than mere scientific interest. They were the true locals of this space, and his companions. He paused while he reflected on his solo expeditions and then recalled sweetly: ‘I don’t believe there was a single day that went by where I didn’t see another living creature’.

 ~

Sometimes people seek out void spaces like the poles because of what Shackleton calls the ‘lure of little voices’, which tempts those with curious minds out from the comfortable corners of the earth. Robertson certainly felt this when he first sailed south aboard the Iron Bark II, the vessel he built specifically to handle the trials of the ice. At this time, long before the internet, Antarctica was an alluring mystery. No-one, or at least no one that Robertson had access to, knew much at all about the continent at all.

But the voices pulling him outwards were helped by the voices pushing him onwards. It was Robertson’s attempts to get away from the collective natter of humankind, the constant hum of our technological developments, and the relentless homogeny that he saw forced upon every inch of land, that also led him to seek out those few untouched places. ‘We have one large mammal in plague proportions on earth, and I would really rather keep away from the bastards’, Robertson laughed before he went on, this time more reflective, ‘a landscape that has not been modified by humans is getting to be a very rare thing on this earth’. 

And yet the polar regions have been modified by human influence, most strikingly by the effects of global warming, but also in other ways that Trevor has noticed from his unique perspective aboard Iron Bark. The advent of technology and the impact of western expansion has been incredible disruptive for many Arctic communities, as well as for many indigenous peoples around the globe. Meanwhile, since Robertson’s first expedition to Antarctica, the cruise industry has brought tourism to the continent. The concentration of vessels during a small window in the summer months has the potential to damage the ecosystems of the peninsula without adequate management.

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Robertson never took Shackleton’s books with him during his expeditions, the second hand bookstore he raided before his first journey south was light on ‘Golden Age’ Antarctic Exploration, and perhaps that is for the best. Shackleton’s quote seems to favour a view of the frozen world as a place to conquer in exploration, or to expose for scientific knowledge. All of this is to miss the point for Robertson.

Robertson travelled to the higher latitudes to get to know them in a non-superficial way, and that meant staying the winter. ‘Probably the best reason to spend a winter on a yacht in the arctic’, Trevor writes, ‘is to see the full round of seasons, something that a vessel making a short summer dash misses. In the summer it’s never dark, and in the winter it’s never bloody light, and there’s an interesting gap in the middle’. When I first asked what it was like in such a blank place, he corrected me, ‘It’s a snow-covered landscape, but it’s a long way from a blank one’.

 In his eyes, the Arctic and Antarctic aren’t Shackleton’s void spaces; they are full spaces, void of humans. These are precious areas that the world retreats to so that it might to escape human influence, and among the space and stillness of these icescapes, it breathes.

Robertson has travelled using only the wind, and remained frozen into the ice on the landscapes own terms. In doing so, he has gained an intimate understanding of the polar regions. For a short time, he became a part of that world, and for a short time, he shared its vulnerability. I believe that in this exile, Robertson might have recognised these icescapes to be much like a part of himself. And perhaps, that is why he so calmly recounts his overwintering tales.