North again
Early on a grey May morning I fought my way through the unpleasantness of Stansted airport and flew back to Tallinn. My passport had become so dog-eared that I was nearly turned back by the customs officers, and I had cut the timing fine so that I had to run to the gate. Stressed, tired from an early start and worrying how Teal had fared over the winter, I didn’t particularly enjoy the flight.
Tallinn was waking up by the time I arrived though, and the clear cold weather was refreshing. My trepidation proved to be entirely unfounded too, as my little ship proved to be in remarkably good condition. The tarpaulin I had thrown over her so hurriedly when I left was in tatters in several places where it chafed on sharp corners, but the bulk of it was intact and it had kept the interior completely dry. Almost everything was just as I had left it, although a bottle of wine in the little space behind the cooker had burst. The winter must have been cold enough to freeze it, but not cold enough to inflict a similar fate on the remains of the bottle of whisky that Peter and Francoise had brought with them. The electrics had suffered a little from the damp and cold of winter. The LED navigation lights that Julian had constructed no longer worked, and neither did my mobile phone charger. Given that the echosounder had developed a fault even before I had left her the previous autumn, that in fact meant that not a single electrical item worked. Oh well. I had intended to be a luddite after all.
There was also a little damage from the wooden cradle that the yard had made after I had left to keep her upright. The cradle itself was sturdy and gave good support to the boat – but no-one had bothered to pad the sharp corners, with the result they were digging deep into the planking. In fact, it looked worse than it was, as the wood of the cradle had been crushed as much as that of the boat, but the biggest problem was that I couldn’t easily do anything about it while the boat was still on the cradle! I only got round to repairing that damage the day she was launched, by sawing the offending corners off the cradle, then filling the damage with polyurethane sealant. It was not the nicest of repairs, but I was confident it would last me the voyage back.
The next few days I split my time between working casually on the boat and relaxing, reading the books I had brought and sometimes wandering into town. I sanded and repainted the topsides, as there were plenty of scuffs and scrapes from the previous year, and put a new coat of antifouling paint on her bottom. Black would be the colour of the year I decided, as I couldn’t get hold of the maroon paint I had used the previous year. It looked good – I am sure for most of her life she has worn good old tar on her bum, so the black looked very traditional. I knocked the old echosounder transducer from its hole in the hull and replaced it with the one I had temporarily screwed to the bottom of the rudder last year, and while the mast was down took the opportunity to splice and fit a new shroud to replace the one that Julian had chopped through with the bolt croppers the morning we left Maldon.
I had flown out to Tallinn with plenty of time to spare before my first crew joined me. This was partly because I wasn’t sure just how much work would be needed before Teal was ready to sail again, but partly because a boat show was scheduled to take place at Pirata towards the end of May, and they needed to clear the hard standing space where she was lying. Although they had offered to move her elsewhere while the show was on, it seemed more sensible to just get her launched as the site was being cleared.
So on the 21st May, the little red crane that had lifted her out the previous autumn chugged up to the yard early in the morning. There were quite a number of boats to be launched, and Teal was well down the queue, so I pottered around finishing a few odd jobs while I waited.
Eventually the crane trundled up next to Teal, and the driver extended the supports while I put the slings around her. His English was little better than my Estonian, but he had done this a million times before so didn’t really need me to tell him anything. He picked her up, slewed her over a great gleaming gin palace that had turned up for the boat show, and gently placed her back in her proper element. It took only a few minutes, and once I had her secured to a pontoon we put a strop on the mast and lifted that in place. Securing it temporarily so that I could finish with the crane took little time, but I discovered I had made the loop in the new shroud I had spliced a little too big, so that it kept slipping off the hounds. It needed 6 or 7 trips up the mast to finally sort everything out.
I celebrated with some fine Estonian beer from the local supermarket, inspiringly named ‘Turbo Disel’. Served in 2 litre plastic bottles, yet surprisingly drinkable, at 7.5% alcohol it had a kick like a mule. Straight 'disel' at a mere 5 % was also available for those whose constitutions baulked at the refined stuff.
The weather turned warm and sunny the day of the launch, and I exchanged my thick fleeces, woolly hat and insulated gloves for shorts and t-shirt. I took life easier now that the old girl was in the water, spending plenty of time exploring the city and reading, and just plodding on with the odd jobs that remained when I felt inclined. I took apart the repair to the cracked porcelain on the loo, which had started leaking somewhat unpleasantly towards the end of the previous year, reglued it and strengthened it with a metal band – thankfully, entirely successfully! I also made a start on painting the interior of the boat. But by the time a section of the boat had been cleared for painting, its contents jammed into the rest of the tiny space, and then that space made uninhabitable by sticky walls and unpleasant solvent fumes, life on board became even more cramped than usual, so I did not get much of that done. The interior stayed patchwork until I got home to Britain.
Within a couple of days of the launch Teal was again in sailing condition. It was time to go for a shakedown cruise, and luckily at just the right time I found a crewmember to join me. Quite often people who were passing by would stop and chat, interested in this little boat that had sailed all the way up from Britain. One day I got chatting to Tanel, a chap about my age who had done a bit of sailing and was keen to do more. He used to work backstage for a theatre company, he told me, but now he had a more sensible job selling double glazing. When he turned up again a couple of days later I asked him if he’d like to come on a quick cruise out to one of the nearby islands.
We set off on the 28th, hoping the wind might allow us to head to Prangli, an island a days sail to the north and east of Tallinn. But the forecast didn’t look too great for getting back, so we plumped for Naissaar again, just across the bay.
It was a beat all the way, into a rising wind, but the boat was fine and everything seemed to work. We arrived just as a yacht race from Pirata was finishing - we got a hooter as we crossed the line in third place, although it has to be admitted that we did start several hours before most of the fast bermudan yachts. We were greeted by the same old friendly harbour master, who seemed chuffed to bits that we had come back to his island. The crews in the yacht race invited us to their prizegiving, where we ate delicious cinnamon pastries and drank their sweet, strong black tea. Then we set off to explore the island again, for despite having lived most of his life within sight of the island, Tanel had never ventured out there. During the communist era it was strictly off limits to civilians, and for many years afterwards was still dangerous because of all the mines left lying around.
We followed the coast south along the narrow gauge railway, as I had done with Rachel, and found the little settlement to be slightly more lively than it had been the previous year. A native chatted volubly in Estonian to Tanel, who translated for me. 'Yes, the train has been restored by some volunteers' we were told, 'and some of these houses have been done up too. Come round later - there will be more people about in the evening'. He unlocked one of the buildings for us, where a tiny museum had been set up to showcase life before the soviet occupation. The Swedish fishing folk who had lived here had emigrated en masse when the country was taken over. The island was now a national park, but the Estonian government had recently allowed those whose land had been appropriated to come back and resurrect their old houses. Several of the buildings were being restored, and the beautiful old wooden church had scaffolding (also wooden) halfway up the tower and an interior full of wood shavings and the tang of freshly sawn pine.
We found the path we had failed to find the previous year, which however wasn't particularly different in character to the route I had taken with Rachel, one track in the woods being pretty much the same as another. Everywhere now though had the fresh smell of spring and the lush green of new growth. Tanel was picking the little buds of new needles from the pines trees as we went along. 'Here, try one' he said. They tasted as fresh and resinous as they smelt.
Where the track took us close to the coast again we came across a discarded heap of old mines. We had come across a few already, stacked in neat piles by the harbour for the visitors to look at, but here they had just been dumped to rust away with the grass growing thick around them. The track swept into the forest again, and a little further on we came across a barbed wire fence. Old fish tins had been attached to it to jangle and give warning if anyone should touch it, but the posts were rotten now, leaning at crazy angles, and the wire and tins were disintegrating into flaky orange rust. We climbed a wooden watchtower that stood at the corner of the fence, taking care not to fall through the rotten steps, and imagined the dreary life of a Russian soldier sent to guard the mines.
Inside the fence were a number of depots. A branch of the little narrow-gauge railway came this way too, and on platforms built either side of the sidings were hundreds - thousands - more rusty mines. I could see now why it had taken so long for the island to be declared safe again after the Soviets left. The job of making that volume of explosives safe cannot have been an easy task. It was an eerie place, so quietly and peacefully decaying; rust, rot and regrowth returning this place of war back to nature.
At the boat again we sat and ate dinner while the few tourists who had arrived on the little daily ferry straggled back along the breakwater to catch their boat home again. A friendly elderly Swedish lady stopped to chat and ask us about our sailing.
We mooched back down to the settlement later to see if there was any more life. A few picnic tables had been set up under a wooden roof, and a fire blazed in one corner. The man we had chatted to earlier was there, and so were a couple of groups of people staying in the holiday houses, plus an enormous alsation, a tiny stiff-legged chiuaua with an ugly boil the size of an egg protruding from its bottom, and a wild looking man with tousled hair, a moustache that would be the envy of Asterix the Gaul and a waistcoat made from the skin of some local animal; seemingly with only the most cursory of tanning or tailoring.
Tanel and the wild man talked for a while, as I warmed myself by the fire - it was a chilly evening. 'He is the - how do you say it? - inhabitant', Tanel told me, 'The inhabitant?' I asked. 'Yes. In the winter he lives here alone - the other man we spoke to, and the harbour master are only here in the summer'. It explained his appearance.
A couple of the holiday makers talked English, so I chatted to them for a while. They were Finnish, and came here every year now; they loved the peace of the island. One of them showed me a book, a history of the island, written in Swedish with many old pictures. 'Did you see an old lady going down to the ferry today?' she asked. I said we had. 'She wrote the book - she lived here as a child, and she comes back often now. She's restoring her old family house.'
From somewhere a couple of bottles of vodka made an appearance, and with the fire they took the worst from the evening chill. Late in the evening we walked back to the boat.
It rained heavily overnight, and in the morning the wind had swung round to the south-east, meaning we would have to beat back to Tallinn. I decided to leave the harbour under just staysail and mizzen, as the entrance to the harbour on Naisaare is through a fairly narrow buoyed channel, and I thought that would give us the best chance of doing it slowly and safely. However, it proved to be a bad choice, as the wind died a little just before we left, and the two small sails didn’t give enough drive to power through the short, confused seas in the entrance. As a result, we didn’t manage to tack when we should have done, and drifted out of the channel to bump a couple of times on the bouldery bottom. We got the oars out to push off (I should have had them to hand earlier), and after pushing off were able to run back to the harbour to sort ourselves out.
We put the main and jib up and tried again, and made it out far more easily. It unsettled me a little though, reminding me that narrow rocky passages aren’t always the easiest or safest places to navigate in a small sailing boat without an engine - and my planned route through the Finnish islands would take me many such places.
Once we were out the harbour it was an easy, if slow, sail back. We couldn’t quite point to Pirata with the wind where it was, so aimed towards Viimsi, the peninsula that juts out to the north-east of Tallinn. Just off the land the wind died completely, and we sat in the hot sun eating a leisurely lunch and watching the ferries, hydrofoils and helicopters that shuttle all day between Tallinn and Helsinki. All of a sudden the wind sprang up strongly from the north-west, and we were flying back over a flat sea the last two miles to Pirata. It was as fast as I had known Teal go, her stem hissing purposefully through the water and a creamy wake bubbling out from the transom.