The notebook is a blue hard-backed ledger, the kind you can buy at the stationer’s on Mercer Street for one florin sixty. Tom Compton started it on 24 March, the day he fitted the first beacon to Percy Dalgleish’s Northern Light. Each entry records the vessel name, captain’s name, date, fitting time, and any notes. The notes have grown longer as the weeks have passed.

Entry number sixty-three reads: “Harbour Star. Captain Vera Inch. 21 April 2026. Fitting time: 1 hr 45 min. Captain assisted with wiring. Knew her way around the junction box better than most. Youngest captain in the fleet. Boat named after grandmother — Vera Inch Sr, who rang the harbour bell for forty-one years. Captain says she can still hear it.”

Vera Inch is twenty-eight years old, the daughter of Captain Walter Inch, whose Harbour Bell received beacon number twenty-six in early April. She has been skippering the Harbour Star — a nine-metre clinker-built trawler, registered 2021 — for two years. Before that, she crewed for her father. Before that, she mended nets on the quay after school.

“My father named his boat after his grandmother,” Inch said, securing a cable tie with the easy confidence of someone who has fixed things on boats since childhood. “I named mine after the same woman. She deserves two boats.”

Compton, twenty-three and three years into his boatwright apprenticeship under his uncle Reg, has become a familiar figure on the harbour quay. He arrives at 6 AM, works until the light goes, and eats his lunch — brought from home by his mother, a fact he asked this reporter not to print — on whichever vessel is next in line. His fitting rate has risen from two per day in the first week to a steady three. On good days, four.

Sixty-three of ninety vessels are now fitted. The remaining twenty-seven include eight that are currently at sea, four undergoing maintenance at the Harbourfront boatyard, and fifteen awaiting scheduled appointments. Compton estimates completion by the first week of May — roughly on the timeline the Council Maritime Affairs Committee approved in March.

“The work isn’t hard,” Compton said, coiling a length of signal cable with the absent-minded precision of someone who does it forty times a day. “Each boat is a bit different — different wiring, different mounting points, different captains who want the antenna in different places. But the principle is the same. You give the boat a voice, and someone out there listens.”

The beacons, manufactured by Ashwater Signal Works at 220 florins per unit, transmit a vessel’s position at five-minute intervals to the Port Authority receiving station. The system does not prevent disasters. It tells the Harbour Authority where every boat is, and when one stops moving.

Wilfred Poole, secretary of the Fishermen’s Benevolent Association, visited the quay on Tuesday and reviewed Compton’s notebook. He turned the pages slowly.

“Tom Compton writes down the name of every boat,” Poole said. “And the name of every captain. And their stories. When this programme is finished, that notebook will be the most complete record of the Bobington fishing fleet anyone has ever compiled.”

Compton, asked about this, looked embarrassed. “It’s just a notebook,” he said.

Twenty-seven lights remain. The fleet awaits.