The bombshell theory has exploded on Tiktok (Image: IG)
TikTok “investigators” have seized upon claims that Jay may have wanted to escape after a £12,000 Rolex went missing.
The boat in question would have been accessible down the nearby Los Gigantes cliffs at a jetty on Masca beach.
Theorists claim Jay would have had to toss his phone into scrubland, or turn off his phone, close to where the last ping was recorded and not turned it back on since.
No phone has been recovered as yet.
A 14ft Belgian-registered yacht named the Maruba was recorded as mooring about two miles from Masca beach at 7.10am the morning of his disappearance.
By 8.50 it was recorded travelling past Masca beach, leading sleuths to ponder if it stopped to pick him up or even force him on if he didn’t go by choice.
The boat did a loop manoeuvre off shure before it disappeared from electronic tracking at about 10am.
There is no suggestion the boat and its crew were actually involved in Jay’s disappearance.
A still image of a man on Tenerife who discusses the ‘boat theory’ in a TikTok video (Image: TikTok)
Missing Jay Slater could have left Tenerife on a yacht that left the island not long after the last sighting of the teen, it has been claimed.
Mysteriously, the boat in question disappeared from electronic radar tracking systems soon after and remained off-grid for most of the next nine days.
It is the latest theory from amateur sleuths posting findings of their investigations on social media sites, largely TikTok.
Jay, 19, has now been missing 26 days after not being seen since June 17.
He is understood to have left an after party after the NRG music event in Tenerife by car on the same day with two men, one who has since been identified as convicted drug dealer Ayub Qassim, at around 4am.
It was previously said they were strangers but it has begun to emerge that he may have loosely known them through other associates.
Jay sent a picture of him inside their car to his friends via Snapchat.
They went to the men’s Airbnb apartment 40 minutes away on the other side of the island in the Rural de Teno National Park, a 10-hour walk from where he was staying with his friends.
The pair had rented a hire car to allow them to drive easily around the island and back to their remote holiday let, named Casa Abuela Tina, located just outside the village of Masca.
There are reports they only rented it for the night.
At 7.30am he is believed to have left their apartment and sent two more Snapchat images of himself outside.
The woman who owned the property said she saw him leave soon after, saying he would walk after missing a bus – a journey that would have taken 10 hours on foot – and this is the last official sighting.
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In another TikTok video the route of the boat is shown (Image: TikTok)
He called one friend while he was on the walk after 8am, but at around 8.30am is said to have made a panicked call to another friend, saying he was lost, had no water and just one per cent phone battery.
Tenerife police reportedly asked the two men to stay an extra day to question before they were allowed them to fly home.
Local police carried out a major search operation, which ended on Sunday, June 30.
Now armchair detectives have identified that a yacht called the Maruba was nearby at the time and left soon after before it “disappeared from the radar.”
Most of the search efforts focused on an area around where his phone last pinged at about 8.50am.
in a remote area in the north of the island not far from the Airbnb in dry and treacherous landscape.
However, it is curious that for the next nine days its movements went unrecorded until it appeared for two minutes off the small island of La Gomera, west of Tenerife.
On June 28 it reappeared again near El Medano on Tenerife’s south coast.
The boats movements have sent TikTokers into a frenzy.
in one video on TikTok, viewed over a million times, entitled “Was Jay Slaster Taken On a Boat?”
A man says “this boat leavers the island not long after the last sighting of Jay, goes out, does a funny manoeuvre in the sea and then turns its homing beacon off… and goes off grid, then comes back on grid quite a long time later.
“The theory is interesting nonetheless, because it’s a possibility that you can’t dismiss.”