ADDICTED to ADVENTURE
Bob Shepton skied in the darkness, down a Greenland fjord that he’d sailed up only a month before. It was January 2005, and he was overwintering his Westerly 33, Dodo’s Delight, just outside Upernavik, a settlement so far north that there was only a blush of dusk at local noon. “Must fill the diesel heater,” he thought to himself when he reached his icebound boat. He walked along the deck, removed the plug, and began to pour. Almost instantly, red flames leapt from below. Something had gone terribly wrong.
A single thought blared in his mind: I’ve got to put out this fire. He jumped down onto the ice and began scraping up snow with a bucket and dumping it into the saloon. But the fire quickly took hold, driving him off. All he could do was watch as Dodo’s Delight burned through the ice.
A Sailor in the Mountains “One day I’ll sail for pleasure,” Shepton joked when I met him at the Banff Centre Film and Book Festival. He was giving a presentation about his high-latitude climbing and sailing adventures, much of which are recounted in his memoir, Addicted to Adventure: Between Rocks and Cold Places.
“I’m having a terrible time trying to fit 80-plus years of life and adventures into 35 minutes,” Shepton told me while preparing for the presentation. The 85-year-old has sailed over 130,000 miles, circumnavigated, sailed in every latitude from the Arctic to Antarctica, and twice transited the Northwest Passage—the latter for which he was awarded Britain’s YJA Apollo Yachtsman of the Year in 2013 (Sir Ben Ainslie and Sir Robin Knox-johnston were the 2012 and 2014 winners). Feats, made all the more incredible, considering he accomplished them in retirement and didn’t start sailing until the age of 43.
Sailing, however, is just half the story. Shepton is also an accomplished climber and has scaled many previously unclimbed Arctic peaks. His adventures have been documented in films such as Vertical Sailing Greenland and The Adventures of the Dodo, and earned him legendary status in the climbing community as well as a Piolet d’or, one of climbing’s highest honors.
It’s no surprise that he’s also a two-time winner of the Royal Cruising Club’s Tilman Medal and often compared to its namesake, Bill Tilman, an adventurer who gained legendary status by sailing and climbing in some of the world’s most extreme and remote places.
Being a sailor in a sea of puffy jackets and beanies (the Banff Festival is an international mecca for mountain folk), I was excited to sit down with Shepton after his presentation and chat sailing. We convened over coffee in the cabin of Elsie, a 10-meter fish-boatcum-artist-studio, permanently moored in the middle of the woods at the Banff Centre.
A Higher Calling Shepton spent much of his early life in search of high places. “The Royal Marines instilled in me a passion for rock climbing,” he said. He went on to spend much of his time developing climbing routes on the south coast of England in the 1960s and ’70s,