KEY POINTS:
Grant Redvers hadn't been expecting the rapturous welcome he and the crew aboard Sir Peter Blake's former boat received when they pulled into the French fishing port of Lorient.
The New Zealander and a rotating crew of international scientists had been living a low-key life in a magical
world of ice and polar bears, isolated from the headlines.
In Lorient, they were greeted as heroes. Thousands of people lined the quay, cheering and waving.
There were helicopters overhead and a flotilla of boats followed the Tara, once called the Seamaster, as the tough polar schooner and crew returned from an historic voyage consisting of months trapped in the ice of the Arctic, though their scientific expedition was cut a little short due to climate change.
The ice is melting faster than anyone had thought possible and an adventure expected to take two years or more was over in a year and a half.
It was still quite an adventure though, and one carried out in a "fairy-tale" environment that Redvers pines for now he is home.
Redvers was team leader and the only New Zealander on board. He was also the only crew member to stay in the Arctic the whole time the boat was purposely trapped in ice and allowed to drift with the transpolar current.
Out on the ice, surviving day by day, the crew had no idea of the excitement the expedition had created in Europe, and especially France, says Redvers, who slipped back home to New Zealand to little fanfare for a spot of rest and relaxation.
Unsurprisingly, he is relishing the warmth of the New Zealand sun.
His short-term goal is to fish, then get to work writing a book. Then it's another adventure - either Antarctica or the melting northern climes once more.
Redvers feels pretty good about what he and the others achieved with the French-owned Tara and the expedition backed by European research organisation Damocles.
"Having stepped back a little bit I'd have to say I'm quite proud of the fact that we achieved our goals and now hopefully it's going to pay dividends.
"We're impatiently waiting for our scientific team to crunch the numbers and do some deeper analysis of the data."
He thinks the results could be a bit daunting. Already the testing carried out by the team has revealed temperature change in the northernmost part of the world is more dramatic than expected.
Scientists have described the retreat of summer sea ice in the Arctic as "spectacular", predicting it could be completely gone within eight to 10 years.
"It's pretty grim I suppose," says Redvers. "Everyone's talking about global catastrophe and we're going to have to change our way of living.
"At the end of the day we're just going to have to learn to adapt, and the action we take now might be a little bit late for our generation but it's going to pay dividends in a couple of hundred years, maybe."
Redvers, a scientist originally from Masterton, has travelled to Antarctica about seven times but this was his first trip to the Arctic and he reckons he has caught the chronic disease of polar explorers.
"This polar Antarctic/Arctic thing, it doesn't take long before you start to really want to go back again. It pulls you back. You start to daydream about that sort of environment, it's such a fairy-tale type of land."
Though the Tara failed to make the pole, Redvers says that given the rate ice is melting, maybe next time they will be able to sail right up to Earth's northernmost point.
One who might have been looking down is Sir Peter Blake, who was murdered by pirates aboard the boat in December 2001 on a voyage up the Amazon.
On the trip back from the Arctic, the Tara stopped at Portsmouth and hosted Sir Peter's widow, Lady Pippa Blake, for dinner.
Redvers says she told the crew how pleased she was the boat was continuing her husband's environmental work.
The Tara may visit New Zealand in the next couple of years, he says, and he and Lady Pippa discussed how its profile might be lifted here.
"Being the only Kiwi on board everyone knows that story, or boaties know the story, so every port you go into, whether it's a small port in Argentina or somewhere in Norway, they don't initially recognise Tara as the boat Peter had. But then after you get talking they ask the question, 'Oh, is this the Seamaster?'
"You just sense that there is such a huge amount of respect for the man and what he did and what he stood for.
"Talk to anyone around the world and he's a global icon."
KEEPING EXPLORER'S ARCTIC DREAM ALIVE
The Tara followed the footsteps of Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who set out in 1893 to drift from one side of the Arctic Circle to the other and be the first to reach the North Pole by boat.
Nansen never made it, eventually abandoning his boat, the Fram. He carried on by foot but still did not make the North Pole.
But he did prove the existence of the trans-Arctic current - the movement of ice, not land, in a clockwise direction around the pole. Nansen was the first to identify dead water, when a layer of fresh water rests on top of more dense salt water, without the two layers mixing. A ship can find it hard to move in such conditions because its propellers just churn up the water.
Nansen's voyage took three years but because the ice is moving so much faster today, the Tara's expedition took half that time.
The only regret Grant Redvers has is that even though the Tara made history by getting closer to the pole than the Fram - they passed within 120 kilometres - they did not reach it.
He thinks Nansen may look down and think, "'You were bloody fools not going to the Pole'. and I think he'd be right. We did his dream drift actually, just skimming right next to the pole".
But while Nansen's motivation was to reach the pole, the Tara was there for the science.
