In a secret lock-up, SUE REID finds the little boat that was a retired couple's delight until it was stolen by French people-smugglers. So will Britain let them have it back?

Laughing and crying at the same time, French pensioners Eric and Nadia Blin peered in disbelief at the Mail’s photograph of their stolen cabin cruiser.

The tiny boat was snatched from the canal near their home in northern France one night in February by criminals who sailed it across the Channel with illegal migrants on board.

‘We were told by the French police that she had reached the UK with the migrants,’ said Eric last week at the couple’s house in the village of Watten, 15 miles inland from the port of Dunkirk.

‘Our police promised us Britain would return her to us. But we don’t know if that will ever happen.’

The couple are overjoyed that we traced their red and white cabin cruiser called Aidan (Nadia’s name in reverse) after combing the ports, boatyards, beaches and inlets along the coastline of Kent and East Sussex.

We found the Blins’ boat, as our photograph shows, in the corner of an open-air compound, surrounded by wire fences, amid scores of black rubber dinghies seized by Border Force officers after illegally carrying migrants to the UK from France.

Its distinctive blue flooring on the deck area remains intact, as do an array of white fenders.

‘It’s the right one,’ said Eric as he stared at the photo.

‘I never thought we would set eyes on her again,’ adds Nadia.

The theft of Aidan had left newly retired Eric and Nadia distraught, and their plans to spend this summer sailing the canal and its tributaries in disarray.

‘Every day without the boat is a wasted day of our retirement, which we hoped to enjoy on the water. It was going to be perfect,’ the couple, both 62, explained, as they talked over each other in their excitement after we knocked on their door.

Eric, a former welder, bought the boat online for £2,200 last August as a retirement treat for his wife, a former laundress.

He spruced up Aidan by re-painting her and found a mooring on a feeder channel to the main canal leading from Watten to the North Sea at Dunkirk.

Nadia was thrilled. ‘We were going to spend this summer pottering about on the waterways, enjoying days out and picnics,’ she said.

That was until the people smugglers struck.

There have been a worrying spate of boat thefts by traffickers from the canal area in this once crime-free and picturesque part of France.

The trafficking gangs, which regularly launch their cross-Channel migrant dinghies from Dunkirk’s beaches, have moved their set-off points inland in a bid to avoid French police patrols.

Eric had chained the Aidan up securely for the winter at the bank near his terraced home. ‘I thought she was safe,’ he said. ‘I put the outboard in my garage and was going to get it out again for this year’s sailings.’

Then, one morning two-and-a half-months ago, as he drove to a petrol station to fill up his car, he glanced over the canal bridge and noticed Aidan was missing.

The chains had been cut. The mooring at the bank was empty.

‘I told the police that day,’ he recalled. ‘They made a report. We were both very upset when they said it had been taken to England, but we were promised the British would give us the boat back.’

Earlier this month, Dunkirk police investigating the theft again reassured Eric that the British would return the Aidan. But they have heard nothing since.

‘We were given no news of where Aidan was in England, or even if she was still in one piece,’ he told the Mail. ‘We worried that the British authorities might just break her up and forget us altogether.’

The night Aidan was stolen was a busy one for migrant crossings in the Channel. According to Government records, three traffickers’ boats sailed from France to the Kent coast over 14 hours, with 124 people on board, many of them Iraqi and Iranian.

The illicit craft were guided out of French waters by the country’s navy and escorted by UK Border Force vessels into Dover on the morning of Saturday, February 10.

It is thought the Blins’ precious Aidan was not included in the official tally of crossings released by the Home Office for that day because she is cabin cruiser rather than a rubber boat of the type normally used by the gangs.

But, with the help of Eric and other boat owners on the canal, we have pieced together her journey from Watten on that calm but bitterly cold night.

She was stolen just before midnight on Friday, February 9. The trafficking gang had picked her out after scouting the area in the preceding days.

Five migrants — including one child — were put on board after they were brought to Watten from Dunkirk by the gang, either by car, van or train.

Powered by an outboard stolen by the gang from another boat moored on the Watten canal, the Aidan embarked on its perilous journey.

The French police told the Blins that their boat was spotted a few miles from the point where the canal meets the North Sea at 5am.

However, despite the Aidan being obviously designed for use in inland waters, the French did not stop it.

So on went the Aidan, which only had four lifejackets belonging to the Blins on board, heading to Britain.

The vessel was given a forensic examination by Britain’s immigration police after arriving in a bid to help identify the criminals involved in the theft and crossing.

Then, she was put on a transporter and taken to the Kent compound, known by locals as the migrant boats’ ‘graveyard’.

The French police investigating the theft have refused to comment on when and how she will be returned to her owners.

Meanwhile, the Home Office said that when the French probe has concluded ‘the vessel can be collected with proof of ownership by arrangement’.

It seems a very tough stance.

Last week, as the Mail searched for Aidan, we found a yacht called Moon, which also sailed to Britain illegally, with 21 migrants on board, from The Netherlands more than two years ago.

It arrived on a February night in 2022 at Rye Harbour in East Sussex, flying the British ensign on its mast in a bid — successful — to dupe the local coastguard that it was not a rogue vessel.

But the Moon half capsized when it tried to moor in the harbour. The migrants on board, together with the traffickers, swam from the boat to dry land before fleeing the harbour.

UK immigration police launched a probe into the Moon and its occupants, which the Mail has been told is ongoing.

Meanwhile, the yacht remains in dry dock at a private dockyard near Rye Harbour, its British ensign now a limp and battered rag on the mast.

This delay does not bode well for the Blins or for the Aidan.

‘The summer is about to begin,’ said Eric last week as he and Nadia studied our photograph. ‘This is taking an awful long time. We want our boat back so we can enjoy ourselves on the canal.’

It would take a heart of stone to deny them that.