The notebook on the Compton workbench in the Harbourfront boatyard now has three columns: vessel name, date fitted, name of skipper at the time of fitting. The fourth column, which would have recorded the time required for each fitting, was abandoned in week two. Tom Compton stopped writing it down when the average dropped below an hour and stayed there. “It was making me feel slow,” he said.

He is not slow. The seventy-three completed installations have been managed by two men working from two boatyards across roughly twenty-three working days, which gives an average of just over three vessels per day. The peak was Tuesday — seven vessels, five at Harbourfront and two at the smaller yard at Ashwick Reach — which Reg Compton, sixty-eight, called “the best day’s work I have done in this trade since the year I built the Avocet.”

Seventeen vessels remain. Compton’s schedule, taped to the wall of the harbour office and updated nightly in red pencil by harbourmaster’s clerk Ellie Marwick, shows the Saint Brigit, the Hester Rose, the Pollard, and the Eider on Sunday; six more on Monday; six on Tuesday; and the Cornelia — Captain Annette Voss’s longline boat, which has been at sea since Wednesday — fitted on Wednesday afternoon when she returns. That fitting will close the programme.

The Cornelia will not be a small ceremony. The harbour office has confirmed that Captain Dalgleish — whose Northern Light was the first vessel fitted, on the morning of 24 March, and whose argument before the Harbour Authority Board (“We feed this city. The least the city can do is help us come home”) will be remembered for longer than most things said before harbour boards — has asked to be present. So has Alderman Cole. So has Tom Compton’s father, Reg’s brother, who has been retired from the boatyard since 2019 and who, according to Reg, “hasn’t asked to come back for anything until now.”

The signals themselves are beginning to accumulate. The harbour office’s logging clerk, who has been keeping a daily count since the first beacon went live on 25 March, recorded the two-thousandth signal on Friday morning at 11:42 AM. The two-thousand-and-twentieth came at 4:14 AM Saturday, from the Margaret Hen, fitted on Monday, sailing in fog approximately twelve nautical miles north of the harbour bar. The signal recorded position, heading, and the boat’s speed through the water, which was three knots.

Captain Joel Trevear of the Margaret Hen, reached by telephone Saturday morning, did not at first understand why a reporter wished to speak to him about a fog crossing.

“It was a fog,” he said. “Fog happens. We came in slow. We tied up at the cooperative wharf at quarter past five.”

It was explained that the harbour office had received his beacon signal three times during the crossing — at 4:14, at 4:38, and at 5:02 — and that, for the first time in the working memory of any harbourmaster’s clerk in this city, no vessel had been listed as “position unknown” on the morning fog board.

There was a pause.

“Well,” Captain Trevear said, “that’s something.”

There were other things. Compton, asked at his workbench what the next stage of the programme should be, said the answer was the half-decked boats — the smaller inshore craft, perhaps fifty of them, which had been excluded from the mandatory programme on grounds of cost. He had been thinking about a simpler beacon, perhaps a third the size, perhaps a quarter the cost, that could be retrofitted to a wooden hull without the structural reinforcement the larger units require.

Reg Compton, listening from across the workbench, did not look up.

“Tom builds one boat at a time,” he said. “Then he builds the next one.”