The notebook is a pocket-sized Moleskine with a green cover, purchased from Fowler’s Books for one florin eighty before Cedric Fowler began his closing sale. It has forty-eight pages. Twenty-two of them are used. Each entry follows the same format, written in pencil in a hand that suggests someone who thinks carefully before committing anything to paper.

Entry one: Northern Light. Captain Percy Dalgleish. White, two sugars. Tiller carved by his grandfather.

Entry twenty-two: Sea Thistle. Captain Moira Hennessy. Black, no sugar, brought her own flask. Hull planking from a demolished church pew.

Tom Compton, 23, is the nephew of Reg Compton, the boatwright who offered to fit position-reporting beacons to Bobington’s fishing fleet at cost. The elder Compton has been doing this work for larger commercial vessels for over a decade. The Council Maritime Affairs Committee funded the programme on 19 March — 90 units at 220 florins each, manufactured by Ashwater Signal Works. Tom has been his uncle’s hands and eyes since the first fitting on 24 March.

The work takes between ninety minutes and three hours per vessel, depending on hull construction, wiring accessibility, and the temperament of the captain. Each beacon is a sealed unit approximately the size of a biscuit tin, mounted to the wheelhouse roof or foremast housing and wired to the vessel’s 12-volt electrical system. It transmits a coded position signal at ten-minute intervals to the Port Authority receiving station.

Twenty-two vessels fitted in nine days. Sixty-eight remaining. At the current pace, the programme will be complete by late April — ahead of the original six-week estimate.

“Uncle Reg does the wiring,” Tom said, sitting on an upturned crate at Harbourfront boatyard on Monday, eating a cheese sandwich and reviewing his notebook. “I do the mounting, the sealing, the cable runs. And I write it down.”

He writes it down because, he says, he wants to remember the fleet. Not the fleet as a list of registration numbers — the Harbour Authority has that — but as a collection of vessels, each with a history, each carrying a captain who takes their tea a particular way and has a story about their boat that they will tell you if you are young and quiet and working on their roof for two hours.

“Captain Dalgleish told me his grandfather carved the tiller from a single piece of elm,” Tom said. “That was the first boat. I thought: I’m going to write that down. And then I thought: I’m going to write them all down.”

Some entries are brief. Entry six: Gannet. Captain W. Price. Milk, strong. Bought the vessel sight-unseen at auction. Some are longer. Entry fourteen: Bright Hope. Captain S. Alderman. Tea with honey, very particular about the honey. Named after his daughter. She’s four. The beacon is the first new equipment he’s put on the boat since she was born.

Wilfred Poole, secretary of the Fishermen’s Benevolent Association, learned of the notebook last week when Tom read entry nine aloud to a group of captains waiting their turn at the boatyard. The entry concerned Captain Edgar Vickers of the Temperance — a vessel whose name, Tom had recorded, was chosen by Vickers’s late wife as a condition of purchase.

“Poole asked if he could borrow the notebook,” Tom said. “I said no. He asked if he could copy it. I said yes. He wants to put it in the Association’s annual report.”

Poole, reached on Tuesday, confirmed his interest. “The Association has records going back to 1898,” he said. “Vessel names, tonnages, licences. What we don’t have is how a captain takes their tea and why they named their boat what they named it. Tom’s notebook is the kind of record that matters more as time passes.”

Reg Compton, asked about his nephew’s project, said only: “He’s a good lad. Steady hands. Doesn’t talk while he’s drilling.” He paused. “The notebook is his business. I do the wiring.”

Sixty-eight vessels remain. The notebook has twenty-six blank pages. Tom says he will buy a second if he needs it.

“Mr Fowler’s still open until the end of the month,” he said. “I’ll get another green one. Same kind.”