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Reading: From Sea to Shining Sea
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  • Issue 48

From Sea to
Shining Sea

Meet the Turner Twins.
Words by Alice Vincent. Photography by Richard Gaston.

Meet the Turner Twins.
Words by Alice Vincent. Photography by Richard Gaston.

For someone known for reaching Earth’s most geographically inaccessible places, Ross Turner seems remarkably at home in the still, slightly trapped air of the Royal Geographical Society in London. The place is deserted but full of ghosts: Shackleton’s Burberry helmet lurks in the collection and maps of a 17th-century world hang in the hallway. Alongside his identical twin, Hugo, who joins us on speakerphone from the Lake District, Turner is drawing on this legacy: The pair are professional adventurers, diving deep and roaming wide, rowing across the Atlantic and climbing Mt. Elbrus, Europe’s tallest mountain. 

The 34-year-old brothers—who have the old-fashioned manners expected, somehow, of explorers—have spent the past decade on death-defying missions with modern preoccupations: to do a survey of plastic quantities in the ocean, for instance. Their endeavors were motivated after Hugo broke his neck while diving at the age of 17. Having regained the ability to walk, he decided to live life to the fullest—alongside Ross, whose fledgling rugby career was ended by a broken leg—in some of the most treacherous environments on the planet. When it comes to water, the Turner twins understand its depths more than most, confronting it as ice, snow and ocean, while always ensuring they have enough of it to survive. 

AV: What is the most dangerous situation someone can get into at sea?

RT: I would say shipping lanes.

HT: Shipping lanes are very dangerous. In the daytime it’s fine because you can obviously see a ship and understand the angle at which you’re viewing it, where it’s heading and how fast it’s going. But at night, all you’re seeing is the boat’s lights.

AV: What other things do you need to consider if you take to the water at night?

HT: It’s very instrument-led, but you also have to understand what different boats’ lights mean. Some might flash faster than others, some might flash in sets, others might be continuous flashes. Port and starboard are in red and green, and you have danger markers that are yellow, black and variations between them.

RT: Once you’ve got that, though, it’s actually really simple. It’s a lovely thing because you use more of your peripheral vision and your hearing as you’re going along, particularly if you’re under sail. If you can hear splashing, it usually means another boat doesn’t have its lights on. Sound does travel pretty well on water.

Ross (left) and Hugo Turner (right) have gained a following for doing experiments well-suited to identical twins, including monitoring the effects of a vegan lifestyle and testing the best mountaineering equipment.

AV: Have you ever witnessed bioluminescence—when light is generated by living creatures—in the water?

RT: The first time was when we rowed across the Atlantic, in 2011. Imagine rowing in total darkness, so dark that you can’t see the horizon and there are stars all around you. The reflection of the stars in the water means you’re rowing in a sphere. As we were rowing, our oars produced little whirlpools of bioluminescence. Then we noticed tuna chasing smaller fish under our boat; imagine the shape of a tuna, but somebody’s put really small Christmas lights all over it.

HT: The other time was in Lyme Bay, in the English Channel. We had just completed a sailing project to the center point of the Atlantic to do a plastic survey and we were finishing off with a tour around the UK. We were sailing across Lyme Bay just before midnight and it was suddenly like we were in a Second World War movie: Straight off the beam of the boat were these underwater torpedoes . . . that were dolphins. The water was dark and they were disturbing the phosphorescence. That was one of the most incredible interactions I’ve had with water.

AV: Is it possible to make sense of the ocean’s enormity when you’re rowing across it?

HT: No, there’s nothing—no human references, other than a ship. You can’t reference the scale of anything; therefore, it’s very disconnected. You don’t really feel like you’re on the planet.

AV: Does the water change?

RT: There are definitely different types of water. So the English Channel is a turquoise sea green. And then I think we must have sailed across this imaginary line, where this green coastal water that we find around the UK suddenly goes into what’s called a Caribbean blue, that bright vivid blue. You can tell how far you are off land by the color of the water.

AV: How do you deal with a 40-foot wave?

RT: Forty feet might seem a lot on land but at sea the fetch—or the distance between the top of two waves—could be 200, 300 meters. 

HT: You’re essentially a champagne cork just floating on the ocean: Most waves don’t break on you. The top of the crest might, and they do quite regularly. But that’s the top five feet.

RT: Ocean swells can be scary and beautiful, though. You’ll be slowly rising to the top of what seems like a small hill, and you can see for miles, and then you’re dropped down into it, and you really appreciate that drop. Rogue waves are more unpredictable: They can be double the height of a normal wave, and coming from a different direction. You can’t really deal with them, you just have to suck it up.  

The Turner twins are known for reaching the “poles of inaccessibility”—the locations on Earth that are the farthest away from either water or land.

AV: How does survival at sea compare to survival on ice?

RT: You’ve got to treat them very differently. You can float fairly comfortably in a life raft or on a boat for many days and there’s lots of food in the ocean, so you can survive for months. On snow and ice, though, you’ve only got a finite amount of food. Weirdly, water is also a problem in snow. The worst thing you can do is totally run out of water.

HT: The snow doesn’t melt; because it’s made of very cold water, heat makes it evaporate immediately into gas.  

RT: So you’ve always got to have water in the bottom of a pan and then put snow in, so it’ll melt. In a polar environment, whenever we get to the bottom of a water bottle we leave about an inch, two fingers’ worth. You can’t use gas to start a fire—it’ll freeze—so you have to burn white spirit or any sort of flammable liquid that isn’t butane or propane. Even if we’re not setting up camp, we’ll make some water and fill up the thermos and water bottles.  

HT: Another challenge is to avoid sweating too quickly, whether that’s while trekking, climbing or working. Because as soon as your clothes become saturated with moisture they don’t insulate. Merino wool is the best at drawing moisture away from your body. You can get into all sorts of problems if your clothes get too wet.

RT: For me, the biggest surprise with polar environments is that you can use the snow as a survival tool. If you’re in a storm and starting to get a lot of snow buildup on the tent, you can dig down below the tent—ideally below the vestibule at the front—where it won’t compact and the temperature is only ever just below freezing, even if it’s minus 100 above. We made a whole room beneath our tent. You can wait it out there until the wind stops.

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This story is from Kinfolk Issue Forty-Eight

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