In 1976, Trevor Robertson sailed out of Fremantle Harbour to travel the world. He is yet to discover a compelling reason to stop.
“I enjoy it, and what else am I going to do?” he laughs. “I’m too late in the day to take up macrame or something.”
A legend on the ocean, Robertson has spent the past 50 years sailing the length and breadth of the world. He is Australia’s — and likely the world’s — greatest minimalist sailor.
From his early travels to remote communities in the Pacific to his three winters spent “iced-in” at the extreme ends of the earth, Robertson, who grew up in WA, has crossed the world so many times he stopped counting nautical miles when he reached 250,000.
“It’s probably about 300,000 now, but that is a fairly rough estimate,” he admits. For context, that’s the equivalent of circling the world 14 times. If that seems high, if anything he’s underplaying it; online speculation suggests the number is likely closer to 400,000.
Robertson is chatting to STM in Fremantle, 10 years on from featuring on the magazine’s cover for a story charting his incredible solitary life. That time, he had sailed the Iron Bark II into WA for repairs and to visit family. This time, his boat, the Iron Bark III, is anchored in a harbour in New Zealand, and he has come home via air, for a change.
“The north end of New Zealand, where I have got the boat at present, is actually a good place for a rapidly ageing sailor,” Robertson says. “The anchorage is good and close together, lots of walking to be had which isn’t on bitumen. I probably still have a few years of long-distance sailing left.”
“Rapidly ageing” seems a stretch. Robertson is a young 76, and shows no sign of dropping anchor for good. Just last year, he sailed Iron Bark III from New Zealand to Alaska and back; later this year he is planning on travelling the coast of Chile.
Of course, even the most dedicated sailor needs to spend some time ashore. When the price of oil was good, the UWA-trained Robertson worked as a petroleum geologist on the international circuit, doing extended stints on land only to fund or build his next vessel. He spent “four or five years” in Queensland in the mid-90s building the aforementioned Iron Bark II, a 35ft steel gaff cutter on which he sailed the world a few times over.
That was the boat he took to the extremes of the earth when he spent three winters “iced in”. In 1998, he travelled to Antarctica in the summer months, not leaving until the ice melted enough to leave in early 2000. In 2004-2005, along with then-partner, British sailor Annie Hill, he wintered in the Arctic Circle in north Greenland, and he returned, alone, in 2011. Each time, he sailed in during the short summer and stayed as the winter took hold, spending almost a year each time, surviving on a diet consisting mainly of rice, beans, flour and oatmeal.
Today he sails on the fibreglass Iron Bark III, a Alajuela 38, a 38ft GRP vessel built in California in 1977 and bought by Robertson in 2019.
“I said I would sell it (Iron Bark II) when I turned 70, because I didn’t want to be chipping rust on a steel boat when I was 80. Well, one day it happened, so I have another boat now,” he says.
“I bought it in Florida, crossed the Atlantic a couple of times with it, the Pacific, three times . . .”
Not long after he purchased his new boat, COVID hit. Robertson was in the Caribbean, and found himself stuck on a small island of around 6000 people, that was largely cut off from the rest of the world — not that a little isolation was something new.
“They negotiated a deal where a couple of schooners a week were allowed to go down to Grenada and later to Trinidad,” Robertson explained. “They weren’t allowed ashore; they would just throw cargo onto the deck and return. One schooner made its living entirely by taking full beer bottles from Grenada to Carriacou and then empty ones back for refilling; it was a full-time job. We ran out of all sorts of things but we never ran out of beer. We ran out of chicken, and so the price of iguanas went from $5 up to $20. We could deal with that.”
What does iguana taste like?
“A bit like chicken.”
When he bought Iron Bark III, the vessel was equipped with what Robertson describes as “a lot of paraphernalia that was detrimental to my usage”. He is famously a minimalist sailor, and so he stripped it of what he considered unnecessary additions — like hot water and refrigeration. Robertson rarely uses his engine. He goes with the wind and says the current fuel crisis will have minimal impact on his travels.
He admits that these days, it makes him a rare breed on the water.
“Once upon a time, on my first trip across the Pacific, 40 years ago or so, if you sailed into an anchorage, people would just assume your engine wasn’t working yet again. It would not be a matter for comment,” he says.
“This time, you’re actually a threat.”
It’s not the only change on the water he has witnessed in a lifetime of sailing.
“I came across from Panama to New Zealand, just down the main trade wind route, three years ago,” he says. “The people on that route have changed a lot. They are now gentrified; well-to-do retirees in quite expensive boats. I don’t have a terrible lot in common with them. They are my sort of age, a little younger but not much, but they can be damned annoying. They mostly can’t sail, to tell the truth, or barely, and they insist on patronising me, because I row a dinghy and I don’t have a centre console rigged with a big outboard. I can sail. And I can row. They can’t. It has changed.”
That is not, however, the most notable change Robertson has witnessed over his lifetime. When he started sailing, he visited communities in the Pacific that were still largely undiscovered by the outside world; he says those early trips are among his favourite journeys.
“The Indian Ocean and the Pacific, the communities were still pretty much untouched; pre-internet, pre-television,” he says. “Not only had they never seen a giraffe, they’d never heard of one . . .
“Most people had never seen a television set and now they’ve all got a mobile phone.
“It’s made the world a much more homogeneous place and much less interesting as far as I’m concerned, which is why I have ended up on the higher latitudes. There’s fewer people around and the penguins don’t care.”
He says today, his favourite parts to explore are the remote stretches of Greenland and Iceland.
“Not too many tourists, not too much internet,” he says of the appeal. “There’s still bits of it that are uncharted, which is interesting.”
Robertson says his next trip, to Chile, appeals for its wildness.
“A huge stretch of wild coast with no habitation, no roads, and it’s nearly 600 miles in a straight line from the Chilean channels. The road reaches the sea once in that 600 miles,” he says. “There is one village, and if you go inland far enough, a town. It’s one of the last really big non-polar wildernesses in the world. It’s a lovely spot.”
Lovely, remote and wild. So what does a sailor spend his long days on the ocean doing when the water is calm and skies are clear?
“I read mostly. And I probably get lazier as I get older. Spend more time looking at the birds in the sky.”
And so he sails on.
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