---
title: "Still Making Four Knots, Nobody Aboard. The Gap In The Rail Is 41cm."
dek: "The plotter logged fourteen hours at four-second intervals. At 04:12 the boat came onto a heading and held it, dead straight, for eleven hours. The hauler's fault had been reported in writing and priced at £340."
kind: news (News)
desk: Cryptids
author: Sal Brindisi (fictional)
published: 2026-08-23T05:30:00Z
url: https://theyburied.com/article/still-making-four-knots
tags: Newlyn, Cornwall, single-handed fishing, autopilot, marine accident investigation
genre: satire
status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented
---

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

*The plotter logged fourteen hours at four-second intervals. At 04:12 the boat came onto a heading and held it, dead straight, for eleven hours. The hauler's fault had been reported in writing and priced at £340.*

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.

> **Figure:** Nine point eight metres, and the one place on her with nothing to hold — see https://theyburied.com/article/still-making-four-knots

## 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.

> A pilot does not know anything. It is a compass and a motor and a bit of wire.
>
> — Wendy Pascoe-Trelease

## 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.

## Sources (invented)

- Marine accident investigation file, PZ-registered crabber, March 2026, Investigator's survey, photographs, plotter download and witness statements — Requested under the access regime; released in two tranches over eleven weeks with the medical annex withheld at the family's written request (May–July 2026)
- The vessel's chartplotter log, 12,600 position fixes at four-second intervals, 01:26 to 15:26 — Downloaded by the investigators; supplied to us as the raw sentence log, not as a rendered track, at our request (June 2026)
- Wendy Pascoe-Trelease, Previous owner; sold the vessel in 2023 and wrote the handover notes — Interviewed by video call twice and once on the quay at Newlyn; supplied the notes and the engineer's quotation herself (June and July 2026)
- Ferris Oyelowo-Trembath, Marine engineer, 31 years on small-boat deck gear — Commissioned to examine the recovered hauler and sheave and to write before being told what the story was (July 2026)
- Fishery officer's boarding log, 12 March 2026, Contemporaneous entries made aboard, 15:26 to 16:04 — Obtained from the enforcement authority; the officer declined to be interviewed and we have not named him (July 2026)

## What we could not confirm

- When he went over the side. The plotter records a heading, not a man. Nothing in eleven hours of fixes distinguishes 04:20 from 09:00. The only bracket we have is that twenty-six pots had been shot and twenty-four had not, and we do not know his working rate to better than about an hour either way.
- Whether the hauler fault was ever repaired. The £340 quotation exists and is dated. No invoice does. His engine-room notebook, which is meticulous for two years, stops in November, and the absence of an entry is not evidence that a job was not done.
- Whether he was wearing anything that would have floated. Both lifejackets were in the locker. He also owned an inflatable belt-pack, which two people in the harbour describe him wearing and which does not appear in the recovered inventory. It has not been found and neither has he.

## Right of reply

**Wendy Pascoe-Trelease, previous owner** (Replied in writing on 6 August 2026, asking that it run whole and unsoftened. Printed unedited.):

> You have written my handover notes into an accusation and I would like that undone, so I am going to be plain.
> 
> I wrote those notes because I am honest. I sold a twenty-eight-year-old boat to a man I had known since we were at school and I wrote down everything that was wrong with her, in a list, on paper, and I got a quotation for the worst of it and put that in the envelope too. That is what a decent handover is. Now, because I did the decent thing, there is a document, and because there is a document your story has a hinge, and the hinge is me. If I had been a rogue and said nothing you would have had no paragraph and he would be just as dead.
> 
> And £340. You have that figure in your headline furniture and in your dek and three times in the body, and I understand why, because it is small and it is tidy and it makes a point. Here is what £340 is. It is a bad week. Not a bad day — a bad week, in February, with fuel and levy and a shot string that comes up empty. Every man in this harbour is running something he means to fix when there is a spare few hundred, and there is never a spare few hundred, and the ones who wait for a spare few hundred are not being reckless, they are being solvent. Put that next to your number or the number is a lie by itself.
> 
> On the rail I will give you everything you want and more than you have asked for. Print the forty-one centimetres. Print it big. There is nothing to hold on to at that gap and there never has been on any boat of that size and that is not a tragedy peculiar to him, it is the ordinary arrangement of the whole fleet, and it has been the ordinary arrangement since I was a girl on my father's boat doing exactly the same reach with exactly the same nothing under my hand. If your story causes one owner in this harbour to weld a grab rail aft of the hauler then you will have done more good than the whole inquiry.
> 
> What I object to is the shape you have put it in. You have written eleven hours of a machine going straight as though the machine were the sad part. It is not the sad part and it is not even strange. Of course she kept her heading. She was told to. A pilot does not know anything; it is a compass and a motor and a bit of wire, and asking why it did not stop is like asking why the kettle did not stop. You have made a marvel out of the one component on that boat that behaved exactly as designed.
> 
> The sad part is that a man reached through a gap in a rail to free a warp he had freed a hundred times, and there was nothing to hold, and the whole of the rest of it — the tea, the raft, the lifejackets in the locker, the eleven hours — is just the furniture of an ordinary morning that carried on without him. He was not taken. Nobody was taken. He fell in, out of sight of anything, and the water off the Runnel Stone in March is eight degrees, and eight degrees does not need very long.
> 
> I have read your piece twice and I do not think you are unkind. I think you found an eerie thing and could not resist it. But you should know that in this harbour the eerie thing is the least interesting fact about that day, and the most interesting fact is that all of us knew about that hauler, and about that gap, and none of us did anything, and we still have not.

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They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.