Earlier this year, our friend Hugh took a selection of Manumit merino t-shirts and Trail Sun Hoodies aboard Integrity, a 37ft wooden sailing boat heading for some of the wildest and most remote waters on Earth.
This wasn't a luxury cruise!
Integrity is a replica of an 1879 pilot cutter, built near us in Plymouth by Stirling & Son and sailed much as a vessel of that era would have been. Open cockpit, tiller steering, wooden block and tackle and very few modern comforts.
No showers. No easy way home. Just four men, a wooden boat with a long and potentially treacherous challenge ahead.
I asked Hugh to tell us a little about the voyage and, importantly, how our kit got on.
Over to Hugh…
“Integrity has spent every summer since she was completed in 2012 sailing north to explore places including East Greenland, Iceland, Jan Mayen and other Arctic islands.
In 2022, the decision was made to take her around the world. Since then she's sailed from Iceland to Canada via Greenland, traversed Baffin Bay and taken on the Northwest Passage, often described as the ‘Mount Everest of sailing’, before spending two seasons exploring the fjords, glaciers and remote peaks of Alaska.
For 2026, our passage took us from Sand Point in Alaska, some 2,000km along the Aleutian Islands to the Kamchatka Peninsula, before heading down through the Kuril Islands to Hokkaido in northern Japan.
Around 4,000km and two months at sea.
Along the way we climbed volcanoes, watched orca hunting humpback whales, swam in water 6,000 metres deep, had a run-in with a Russian nuclear submarine and even had Integrity searched by the FSB.
Throughout the voyage we wore Manumit merino T-shirts and the Trail Sun Hoodies as our base layers.
They were a joy to wear, incredibly soft against the skin, without the itch we'd associated with other merino products.
But perhaps the most impressive test came from the fact that there was no shower aboard Integrity.
Four men. Two months. One small wooden boat.
The odour resistance of the Manumit kit was exceptional. In conditions that provided about as rigorous a test as you could imagine, it performed brilliantly.
Safe to say, the crew are now all converts.”
Hugh
There are product tests, and then there are 4,000km across the North Pacific in a wooden boat with no shower!
When we started Manumit, this was exactly the sort of trip we wanted to make clothing suitable for. Kit that's comfortable enough to wear every day, but which earns its place when you take it somewhere genuinely wild.
Merino's ability to regulate temperature, stay comfortable for days at a time and resist odour is why we've built our range around it.
Hearing that it performed aboard Integrity from Alaska to Japan makes us pretty proud.
And Hugh, thanks for giving it one hell of a field test.
Find freedom in wild places.