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## The North Sea in March
The physical conditions of a canoe paddled into the North Sea in March require some acknowledgment, not to add dramatic atmosphere but to make a specific point about the staging of the disappearance.
The North Sea in late March is cold—water temperatures in the Tees estuary area at that time of year run in the range of six to eight degrees Celsius. A person in the water at those temperatures would, without protective clothing, experience significant cold shock and would have a limited time before hypothermia became incapacitating. This means that the staging required some care about where and how Darwin entered the water, if he entered it at all, and how he managed his exit from the water and his movement back to land.
The battered canoe that washed up on the beach the following morning suggested a vessel that had been in the sea. A paddle was also recovered. The physical evidence was consistent with what investigators, at the time, understood to have happened: a man had gone out in a small boat, the boat had been swamped or damaged, and the man had been lost.
It is worth noting that the conditions that made this staging plausible—a cold sea, a small vulnerable craft, a man who might realistically not have survived if the boat had been overwhelmed—were also the conditions that put real rescuers to genuine effort and expense. The search mounted over the four days following the disappearance was not a bureaucratic formality. Five RNLI lifeboats and their volunteer crews, two coastguard teams, a police aircraft, an RAF helicopter—these are real people, putting themselves at some risk, expending real resources, looking for a man who was not there. This is one of the costs of the fraud that sits outside the insurance and pension amounts and the court’s confiscation orders.