The noticeboard at Pellow Wick harbour has become the most followed account in the village, overtaking the parish newsletter, the lifeboat committee and the woman who photographs other people's dogs. Its keeper, harbour master Aldous Fenn, now spends most of his working week supplying it with weather.

Fenn, who inherited the noticeboard from his father and a corkboard before that, said the account's growth had changed his relationship with the sea. "People used to come down to see if the boats were in," he said. "Now they come down to see if I'm about to do something with the sky. It's a different sort of waiting."

The turn came in spring, when a photograph Fenn pinned of a trawler leaning at what he later conceded was a manageable angle was shared by a follower in a neighbouring county. By summer the noticeboard had readers Fenn has never met, some of whom, he said, message the harbour office asking whether there is anything dramatic planned for the weekend.

The staging

Fenn confirmed this week that recent storms had been arranged in advance. He said he selects the less photogenic fronts and keeps the worst of them offshore, so the account can enjoy a good visual without the village losing a boat.

"I can't summon a gale," he said. "What I can do is put the board where the gale is going to be, and time the pinning." He declined to say how many storms he had staged, but admitted the calm spell in June, when the sea lay flat for weeks and the account went quiet, was the hardest period of his career. "I pinned a picture of fog. Then a picture of fog from the other side. People noticed."

Followers began noticing other things too. A retired teacher, Mrs Enid Trebartha, said the same wave had appeared at the top of the board in three separate storms, and that a gull in one photograph was clearly a different gull in the same position in another. "I don't mind a bit of weather," she said. "I mind being told it's weather."

The response

Fenn said the complaints had been pinned to the noticeboard, as is custom, and had themselves become the board's most engaged content. He has since pinned a second set of complaints about the first set.

Asked whether the harbour would return to reporting conditions as they occurred, Fenn looked at the horizon for some time and said the forecast was unsettled.