Last summer, sitting outside his pub near Dover, landlord Nigel Wyndmus saw a small dinghy. A cutter from the coastguard drew up alongside, reports BBC News.
At first he mistook what was happening for a training exercise.
"The boat was just a few hundred yards out," Mr Wyndmus said, "and we realised that it was illegal immigrants trying to get to England."
He added: "People coming across on boats was not really considered an option" - he believed it was all done by stowaways boarding lorries and trying to break into the Channel Tunnel.
But now it seems that an unknown number of migrants have made the desperate decision to swim towards England from the French coast.
While some may try to stagger their journey by taking advantage of small dinghies or yachts, we now know that others try to swim the whole way - across one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.
After months of research by Norway's Dagbladet newspaper (see bottom of page), the identities of two men who tried to do this was revealed.
They bought a wetsuit on the same day last October and were never heard from again.
They may have tried to board a boat of the kind seen by locals in the Coastguard pub, or they may have decided to swim the whole way.
Journalist Anders Fjellberg was alarmed when he first read that a body had been found in a wetsuit in southern Norway.
"My initial reaction was: I hope it's not somebody I know, because I surf and the surf community in Norway is quite small - and if someone is found in a wetsuit they could have been a surfer," he recalls.
But after checks with the police, the case was linked to another discovery of human remains - also in a wetsuit - but this time in the Netherlands.
"The Dutch police managed to trace both of the wetsuits by the serial number to a sports shop in Calais. So we went there to learn how anyone could be that desperate," says Mr Fjellberg. "What is it about this place and these people that drives them to this kind of desperation?"
At first the trail went cold, as the shop staff said the men who bought the suits looked like Afghans.
But as reports trickled out online, the men heard from a man who had been looking for a missing Syrian migrant named Mouaz al-Balkhi.
Tracing first the man's uncle in the northern English town of Bradford then his parents in a refugee camp in Jordan, Mr Fjellberg arranged for a DNA test.
The test was inconclusive for the body found in Norway, but it was a match for the remains washed up in the Netherlands.
"Mouaz was a very kind brother and a great cook," says his sister Rahaf al-Balkhi speaking to us from Amman in Jordan.
"We left Syria and he stayed behind to finish his studies in Damascus."
He joined the family in Jordan but left for Libya looking for a job. His family heard from him regularly, but never saw him again.
He said he wanted to go to England to continue his studies. "The last time I heard from him was on 7 October in Calais," says Rahaf.
That is the date the two wetsuits were bought, and along with the DNA tests it proves to Rahaf that her brother is dead.
"The last thing he said to me was 'I miss you Rahaf.' At first I couldn't believe it, but it's better to know what happened to him."
Later the family and the journalists were contacted by friends of another Syrian man who had gone missing on the same day - October 7th.
His name was Shadi Omar Kataf, and after DNA tests he was identified as the body that had washed up in Norway.
It emerged that he and his sister had fled a refugee camp in Syria controlled by Islamic State militants and later went missing, assumed kidnapped.
Read more of this report from BBC News.
Read Anders Fjellberg's extraordinary investigation for Dagbladet in full here (in English).