Epilogue
It wasn't quite over. The following day we upped sails and anchor one last time, headed back through Harwich harbour with the last of the ebb, and arrived off the Naze as the tide began to turn. With the flood we beat back down the Wallet to the Blackwater.
We threaded our way into Tollesbury fleet - without going aground this time - and at the top of the tide we snugged Teal into a mudberth on the salt marsh. Good old girl. She had done us proud. She deserved a rest now, waking to bob gently to her lines as the high tides flooded in, and snoozing dreamily in a soft cradle of mud as they ebbed again.
Emma left the next day to get back to 'real life', and soon Teal was as shipshape as I could make her and it was time for her owner and master to return to a more conventional life too. Not that I had ever felt like either her owner or her master. I'm not sure you ever really possess a boat like Teal. You merely look after her for a while. And Teal had far too much will of her own to ever be mastered. You could only try to persuade her to take her where you wanted, and she would take her own good time to do so.
As I shouldered my rucksack and took the meandering path across the saltings, I paused and looked back. No doubt our trip hardly compares with the epic sea passages of many far hardier sailors than I, who sailed through steeper, harsher seas. Yet, in our own little way we had completed a challenge, and had the quiet pleasure of having accomplished a task that at times had seemed far from simple. We would no doubt have seen all the same places if we had sailed in a modern yacht with a throbbing diesel and a bleeping GPS, but we would not have had the gentle satisfaction that comes from not merely doing things the easy way. As the last bubbles of Teal's wake dispersed I had nothing tangible to show for the last year or more of my life. But the intangible - the memories of many happy hours spent with friends on board - they would not soon leave me.
Was it really 'real life' I was going back to? Perhaps the last eighteen months had been an escape in many ways. But I wondered if the life I had just been leading wasn't far more real than the one I was returning to. Is the light that softly fills the air of northern Bothnia not more real than the sodium gleam of a streetlamp? Is sweating at the bilge pump of a bucking, leaking wooden boat in the pitch dark of a North Sea gale not more real than sweating at a pen in a stuffy office to finish a paper before the next deadline? Is a cool beer with friends and kindly fellow-travellers at the end of a hard passage not sweeter than the most expensive of cocktails in the swankiest of city-centre bars? When you fly to the far side of a continent in a roaring, polluting airplane, where is the quiet satisfaction of travelling by your own skill and hard labour, using only the pure and simple power of the natural elements? I wasn't convinced that the world of tarmac and offices and cars and concrete that I was returning to was any more real that the one I was leaving.
Where the path left the saltings I met Mick the Brick building a new spar for Estelle. We yarned; plenty had happened since we had met on the hard as Julian and I were sawing my canoe into three. 'You've got something that Arthur and I ain't got no more' he told me. 'Youth... and enthusiam'. Enthusiasm, or stubborness, or eccentricity - perhaps a little sprinkling of something had carried me through at times. But far more than that I had had a game old craft and a bunch of great friends. Without them, this tale would never have been worth telling.
The End