Martin Taylor

My name is Martin. I love rowing.

Like many Orcas Islanders I work under several ‘hats’. In addition to my work as a volunteer coach and all round tech. & communications guy with OIR (I implemented and maintain this web site) I work in a number of related areas:

Here is a little of the story of my life

I grew up in Sheffield a city in the north of England which used to be a steel town making the worlds special steels and fine cutlery. The city center was bombed into rubble in the 2nd world war and the rebuilding was bland and unimaginative. But the city is surrounded closely by beautiful countryside ranging from bucolic to wild. The scene of Jane Austen novels. I hiked the country in my youth with my dad and later I climbed the miles and thousands of cliffs. The area around Sheffield has long been a climbing mecca and produced many of the worlds finest climbers. It was rock climbing that first took me to America. In the mid 70′s Boulder, CO and Yosemite were the meccas of modern climbing. I reveled in the beauty and novelty of a life at once foreign and familiar through movies and literature. I never really recovered from my first adventures in America and now find myself almost as much an American as a working class son of Sheffield.

I spent another lifetime in Northern California becoming educated and immersed in the silicon culture. Designing custom computer chips and working around silicon valley and living in the iconic surf town of Santa Cruz was truly a surreal dream. I loved that life and those places but something in my British genes yearned for British weather. So eventually Marcia, Samantha, myself and our 3 cats drove north a thousand miles and took a ferry to live on Orcas Island.

Living on Orcas has been it’s own kind of adventure. And while living here I have changed the focus of my career from the use of technology to create chips for printers and phones to using it to create art works. Digital photography builds on my life experiences in technology and self sufficient adventure as well as my experience in film photography. I revel in art of photography and the digital technology that now spans every field of human endeavor. I also work in the areas of web and application design and implementation as well as digital book publishing.

Since living on Orcas I have discovered the rich sport of rowing which provides challenges and rewards that are intellectual, technical, philosophical, emotional, psychological and of course physical. It is a sport I hope to be involved in for decades to come.

Martin