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Nobody warned me that the sea would be so loud at four in the morning. I had imagined a gentle hush, the sort of sound they put on relaxation apps, and instead I was met by a grey, grinding roar that seemed to come from beneath the harbour wall itself.

The crew moved around me with the calm of people who had done this nine hundred times. Nets were checked, boxes stacked, engines coaxed awake. Nobody spoke unnecessarily. I had come to write about a dying industry and found, instead, a working morning that carried on regardless of whether anyone wrote about it or not.

By six, the light had arrived without ceremony. Sam, who had fished this coast since he was fifteen, told me the quotas would finish them within a decade. He said it in exactly the same tone he used to tell me where to stand so I would not be knocked overboard: practical, unhurried, faintly amused by my notebook.