Still Making Four Knots, Nobody Aboard. The Gap In The Rail Is 41cm.

NEWLYN, Cornwall — At 04:12 on 12 March the boat came onto 214 degrees and stayed there.

She held that heading, within two degrees, for eleven hours and fourteen minutes, at between 3.8 and 4.1 knots, until a fishery patrol put a man aboard her at 15:26 eleven miles south-west of the Runnel Stone.

The engine was running. The autopilot was engaged. Twenty-four of her fifty pots were still stacked on deck, lashed and baited. The liferaft was in its cradle with the release in date. Both lifejackets were in the locker with the lid clipped shut. There was a flask in the wheelhouse holder, and the boarding officer wrote in his log that the tea in it was still warm.

There was no distress call, no debris, no oil, and no body.

What the plotter says

The vessel is a 9.8-metre single-handed crabber, built in 1998, worked out of Newlyn. Her chartplotter logs a position every four seconds and keeps a fortnight of it.

The investigators downloaded 12,600 fixes, covering the fourteen hours from 01:26, when the plotter was switched on alongside, to 15:26. We asked for the raw sentence log rather than a rendered track, and drew it ourselves.

She leaves the harbour at 02:31 and works. The track is a scribble: on, off, round, back, the shape a man makes hauling gear he shot the week before. Twenty-six pots come up between 03:20 and 04:10.

Then, at 04:12, the scribble stops and a line begins.

Why a straight line is the ordinary thing

Nothing about the line is strange. It is the autopilot going on, which is how a man working alone frees both hands.

You engage it, you go aft, you haul. It is the most routine act on a single-handed boat and it happens several times a morning.

What is unusual is only that on this morning nobody came back to the wheelhouse to take it off.

The fault that was already in writing

The pot hauler had a known defect. Under load the warp — the rope from the pots — jumps out of the sheave groove and runs aft along the gunwale, where it snags.

We know this was known because the previous owner wrote it down when she sold the boat in 2023. Her handover notes list it in the second paragraph, and she enclosed a marine engineer's quotation to put it right: £340, including the sheave, the bearing and half a day's labour.

The engineer we commissioned to examine the recovered gear, who was not told what the story was, found nine millimetres of asymmetric wear in the groove and says the fault was live on 12 March.

To clear a jumped warp you stand at the hauler and reach out and aft, through the working gap cut in the rail for shooting pots.

The investigator measured that gap on 11 April with a steel rule and photographed it against the rule. It is 41 centimetres. There is no stanchion, no grab rail and no jackstay eye within reach on that side.

What we cannot date

The plotter records a heading, not a man. Nothing in eleven hours distinguishes 04:20 from 09:00.

The only bracket is the pots: twenty-six shot, twenty-four not. That gives an hour, perhaps two, and it is the softest number in this story.

The deflation

Nobody was taken. Nothing came alongside. There is no gap in the record for anything to have happened in — the fixes are four seconds apart from dark until the patrol boarded, and they are all in a line.

A man alone put a machine on a heading so that he could use both hands, went aft to free a rope he had freed a hundred times, reached through 41 centimetres of open rail with nothing under his hand, and went into eight-degree water out of sight of any vessel.

The boat then did precisely what she had been set to do, for eleven hours, because a machine on a heading has no way of knowing it is alone.

The previous owner's reply is printed below in full and it is harder on us than the investigation was. She says the eerie part — the straight line, the warm flask — is the least interesting fact about that day, and that the most interesting one is that everybody in the harbour knew about that hauler and that gap, and nobody did anything, and still has not.