It is 6am on Gravelines beach, and all in a day’s work for the smugglers that increasingly control this sweeping stretch of coastline.
All they have to do now is wade through the surf and head back unhindered towards the dunes 300 metres away to regroup and plan tomorrow’s crossings.
The scenes are painfully familiar to any of the 1,200 gendarmes deployed along France’s northern beaches. Some told The Telegraph they are outmanoeuvred and outnumbered by the smugglers.
“We are helpless... there is a French expression ‘donner de la tête’, we are overwhelmed and don’t know where to start, we don’t know where to go, there are so many boats leaving,” says Marc Musiol, a French border police officer in Pas-de-Calais.
One well-placed international policing source labelled the situation a “failure”.
Since the beginning of this year, there have been 22,360 arrivals via small boats into the UK – an almost 60 per cent increase on last year.
The numbers are rising as Sir Keir Starmer promised to “smash the gangs” and hailed a new deal with Emmanuel Macron to stem the tide.
But authorities here suggest the “one-in, one-out” pledge is not worth the paper it is written on. Some also pour scorn on Mr Macron for talking tough without following through with “concrete” changes.
The scene on the beaches of Gravelines on Thursday morning is one replicated along the coast of northern France, when the weather permits.
In the early hours, police patrol cars scour the coastline between the border of Belgium and the Bay de Somme estuary.
Police use drones fitted with night vision technology to scan the dunes where the migrants will camp for the night before they attempt to cross the Channel.
But the distances make it easy for smugglers and migrants to hide from stretched authorities. Gendarmes drive beige 4x4s in teams of three, drive down the shoreline, and survey the waters for inflatable dinghies.
“We are here every night, it is always the same, it never changes,” one officer said as he patrolled a beach car park. “The migrants are everywhere.”
The Telegraph encountered six patrols in the space of two hours during a 3am drive from Calais towards Wimereux, a seaside commune south of Boulogne.
Smugglers launch simultaneous crossings from up to 10 different beaches at a time to divide police attention and resources. Pre-inflated dinghies are launched from waterways and canals and sail down the coast.
The smugglers use weather apps, such as Windy. The apps provide up-to-the-second information on wind speed, direction, and the swell.
Sentries linked to the smuggling gangs are posted in the dunes and near the camps to watch for the boats. They alert over the phone that the dinghy is arriving and that it is time for its passengers to get on board.
Mr Musiol said: “There are always small groups of smugglers who know our beaches very, very well.”
Often carrying nothing other than orange life jackets bought from Decathlon around their necks, the migrants sprint across the beach, hoping to do so before the police have time to react. Sometimes officers do, and fire a salvo of tear gas from grenade launchers. But this is often not enough.
“You have smugglers and their friends who throw stones at the police officers to distract them and to get the migrants onto the boat as quickly as possible,” one officer said.
He estimated that there are roughly only three to six police officers for every 50 migrants trying to enter the sea.
“We have a lack of officers and you have a huge, huge amount of the coast to monitor,” he said. “It is not possible with the number of the personnel the border police have, the gendarmerie, to monitor this entire stretch of coastline and beach.”
Balkan crime groups have established themselves as the dominant players in orchestrating the operations, but police say East African gangs out of Eritrea are rivalling them.
One police source with knowledge of the people-smuggling gangs said efforts to stop the migrants were futile.
“They are going to keep trying, a week later, they are going to give it another go.”
