The wind, which picked up during the day on Tuesday and made it impossible for small boats to attempt more Channel crossings, now looks to be easing. Already, around Calais, there are indications that, despite yesterday’s deaths, smugglers are starting to shepherd migrants towards the dunes along the coast to prepare for more launches.

We saw a group of Vietnamese, who have recently begun arriving in northern France in large numbers, setting off by bus. The French police estimate that the Vietnamese, many of whom appear to be escaping debts to gangsters at home, now make up 20% of all those attempting to cross the Channel.

In the seaside resort town of Wimereux, locals have been digesting the news that 10 people have now died on their beaches this year, with five drowning off a slipway in January, and five more now dying in the waters off a long beach near the golf course north of the town.

“The British are the ones responsible,” said the Mayor of Wimereux, Jean-Luc Dubaele, on French television. He’d previously told the BBC he believed that the UK needed to tighten its employment regulations since it was the prospect of finding work there that he believed lured so many people into attempting the crossing.

Three suspected smugglers who’d been on the overcrowded boat on Tuesday have now been arrested in the UK. They’d continued their journey despite the deaths and reached British waters several hours later.

But there’s no indication that the arrests, or the deaths, will have any significant impact on the smugglers’ operations here in France. We’ve spoken to a number of prospective migrants, and to one UK-based leader of a smuggling network, who all said that it remained, in effect, business as usual.

“The boats are good quality. When the sea is calm it’s easy,” shrugged Noorislam, a 27-year-old from Afghanistan. He’s been in Calais for a year and said he’d made 10 failed attempts to cross the Channel, each time being thwarted by French police.

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