This paper is an investigation of how the specific design and materiality of the artefact of the boat, as well as the various material, visual, technical and geographical practices at work in the space of Mediterranean Sea, orientate a specific space and produce a selective politics of seeing, saving and framing of bodies on the move. It highlights how the very presence and movement of ‘unseaworthy boats’ in this actively orientated space of the sea brings to the fore the many strategies and techniques that have been employed to make it a space of European control. We argue that this is an active and deadly orientation carried out in an often dispersed number of practices and interventions within a seemingly flat space of water. The paper concludes that border transgressors’ act of moving by boat, with all of the losses involved, both challenge and potentially reorientate European mobility regimes.