I GOT back from holiday on Sunday. A ferry from Calais followed by the eight-hour drive from Dover to Glasgow. It was a long journey. But it was nothing like as challenging as the one I accidentally witnessed on Saturday evening.

Ahead of an early morning ferry crossing, we’d decided to enjoy a sunny evening on a Calais beach. We parked up and walked across the dunes to the shore to find a fair number of families with the same idea. Big picnics, teenage photoshoots, plenty of dog-walkers. The scene will not be unfamiliar. What happened next was.

As we looked out over a noticeably calm Channel, a group of some 30 or 40 people, mostly wearing orange life jackets, came tearing out of the dunes a couple of hundred meters away from us.

Holding a black dinghy above their heads, the group ran to the water and leapt into their small boat – a term which could not have been more apt. Frantic rowing ensued as they headed north and west across our views, unmistakably towards the not-quite-visible white cliffs of Dover. If they did have an engine to turn on, we did not hear or see it.

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What we had just witnessed did not immediately register. Amidst the leisure activities happening all around us, this at first glance appeared to be another one. I’m no expert in the world of water sports. However, realisation soon dawned. With it, a new perspective also came on the small plane we had seen intermittently going back and forth over the ocean, which FlightRadar24 suggests may have belonged to the Coastguard.

With the new perspective came new questions. This was no doubt the work of one of the “people-smuggling gangs” we so often hear the UK Government saying it wants to “smash”. Should we call it in? Would doing so negatively impact the innocent people who had been forced to pay thousands to risk an attempt to reach the UK? There are no “safe and legal” routes available to many, after all. Should we, as some journalists argue is right, do no more than passively observe? Was that the moral action here, or a cop-out? In any case – who would we alert?

Those questions were quickly taken out of our minds as, whether there was any communication between a plane and ground teams or not, somebody obviously put a call in with the French services. Just minutes after the small boat had launched, a vessel from the SNSM (essentially their version of the RNLI) was speeding towards it. This boat had the same orange and blue colour scheme as the lifeboats of the UK charity.

We watched the SNSM approach the small boat at speed before shutting off their engines, and frantically strained our eyes to try to see what was happening from our vantage point on the shore. There was clearly communication happening – but what was being said? The two boats appeared to be moving as one for a short time – was the dinghy being towed?

To our surprise, the SNSM boat moved off after about 10 minutes, leaving the dinghy to continue its journey across the Channel. Only later would we learn that the French service does not intervene unless the people on the small boat ask for help.

As we watched the lifeboat speed off to the east and out of sight behind a breakwater, we also watched the small dinghy move farther and farther away, becoming just a black dot on the horizon before vanishing from view altogether. It was only the next morning, when I logged on to read the Sunday news stories, that it came back into sharp focus.

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Saturday had, it transpired, been the busiest day for small boat Channel crossings of 2024. The waveless water had proven a clear opportunity, and a total of 973 people had made the crossing in 17 boats, according to UK Government figures.

Tragically, the treacherous nature of the crossings had been shown despite the calm sea, as reports said four people, including a two-year-old child, had been killed attempting to make it to the UK that day.

Reports on the BBC said those incidents happened on much larger small boats than we had seen. One was reported as carrying around 90 people, 15 of whom were rescued, while the other had more than 70.

Those fatal attempts had both launched from areas many miles west of where we had been. But the incident still made the small boat crossings, which can feel so distant from us in Scotland, take on a much more human level. Approaching things on a more human level is perhaps what UK immigration policy needs.