Destination Greece: Meet the migrants fleeing the war-torn Middle East for a better life in Europe
t is just after 3:00am and so dark I worry we might run over migrant boats without even noticing them.
Suddenly the radar picks up what could be one a short distance away and we are racing towards it.
We are on patrol with the coast guard on the Greek island of Kos, a few nautical miles off Turkey.
Within a couple of minutes, we have drawn up alongside the migrant boat, seven metres long, packed with men, women and children.
Rescuing migrants has become routine for the coast guard, but that does not make it easy.
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The migrants are panicked and fearful, the sea is relatively rough and their flimsy boat could capsize if they all rush to clamber onto the coast guard vessel.
There are just four coast guard officers on this patrol, who are now responsible for 40 migrants.
First you have to convince them to get off their unseaworthy boat.
"Where are we going my friend?" shouts one man.
"Greece, Greece," answers the coast guard officer.
"Greece? You sure my friend?"
What the migrants do not want is to be picked up by the Turkish coast guard before they reach Greek waters.
That is what happened to Mohamad and his friend on their first attempt to reach Europe.
They were brought back to Turkey and put in open-air detention for a night.
The next day smugglers arranged another boat and they set off again, this time making it to Greece.
People smugglers 'the essence of badness'
Mohamad, a 28-year-old sound engineer from Damascus, detests the people smugglers he had to pay to get here.
"Smugglers are you know ... they're like the essence of badness," he says.
Mohamad says he had no choice but to enter Europe illegally with their help.
"If we had a formal way to go to Europe, I wouldn't think of going this way," he says.
He says repeated attempts to get a visa for a European country failed.
"Even if you pay money, if you say that, 'I am a millionaire, I have a million dollars', or a million something, they won't give you a visa because you are Syrian."
He has come here with his brother's friend Yamen, a dentist â middle-class Syrians fleeing a war they want no part in.
"I don't see fighting your brother is a good cause," Mohamad says.
Mohamad and his friend can afford to pay for a cheap hotel room in town while they wait to be processed by Kos authorities.
Many others must make do with the abandoned and dilapidated hotel, the Captain Elias, which serves as emergency accommodation for the migrants.
It is dirty and overcrowded, there is no electricity and water is only available from an outside tap.
The local authorities say they cannot afford to pay for a proper reception centre, and Athens has no money either.
"It is already asking the municipal councils for money in order to pay its current debt," Kos mayor George Kyritsis says of the central government.
"We should perhaps start a campaign telling the Europeans, 'look at the situation, you share the responsibility for this situation'.
"I believe that Greece wants to help but it does not have the means, but Europe looks like it does not have the will to help."
Immigrants dreaming big
Another Muhammad, this one from Pakistan, says staying at the Captain Elias is not so bad.
He feels safe here because no-one bothers him.
"You can't sleep on the roads, on the parks, because you don't know anybody, you haven't relatives here, you haven't friends here," he says.
"This is a totally strange country for you."
Muhammad's journey has brought him from Lahore in Pakistan, through Iran, Azerbaijan and then to Turkey â where he worked for six months to raise the $805 smugglers demanded for a place in a flimsy rubber boat to Greece.
Work as a mill worker dried up at home, he says, as a result of electricity shortages.
Muhammad has spent two weeks on Kos waiting for registration papers which will allow him to leave Kos and travel on to Athens.
There he will try and find work on the black market or try and move on to another European country less broke than Greece.
Unlike his Syrian namesake, Muhammad probably will not apply for asylum, as he is an economic migrant.
His prospects of ever being anything other than an illegal immigrant are slim, but he is dreaming big.
"Now I am free, now I have a chances, because in front of me is the whole Europe," he says.
"I have lots of opportunities and Inshallah (God willing) I will do something better for myself."
As he picks up his papers at the Kos police station he beams with joy and gives us the thumbs up.
"Do you pray for us?" he laughs.
"We shall be successful, Inshallah."
