Diary fragment · 3 min read ·
My Tide Table Corrections
A relief keeper corrects the printed tide tables by hand from his own float gauge, and the next quarter's tables arrive already carrying his corrections set in type.
- dated: "the long watch"
- narrator: "Sam Pelham, relief keeper"
- reliability: reliable
First watch of the long one. The relief began at noon with the kettle and the handover book, and the last keeper was off on the late boat before I had the boards his side. The station is quiet to a religious degree, which suits me, and the tide tables hang open at the current quarter as they hang every quarter. The published heights run shallow of the float gauge, near an inch on the low waters and two on the springs, shallow every quarter the same way, and I have ruled my corrections into the margin in pencil, initial and date, the way the quarter master had me taught when I was new. The gauge is the gauge. Pencil is fair treatment for a printed man.
Middle of the watch. Yesterday's steamer called with stores and the new tables for the coming quarter, printed at the trust's own works. My corrections are in them. Not my pencil: type. Near an inch on the low waters and two on the springs, and the figure beside the fourth of the month is the one I keep on my own board, decimal for decimal. There is no line for corrections by me any more, no initials, no note that a hand was consulted. The tables sit tidy now as if the printed man had been right the whole time and the fault had been mine. I did not send my book anywhere. I went through it twice at the table just now and the pages are as I left them, clean, with my pencil on the side the pencil has always been on.
The Tuesday later. There was a dead day early in the watch, no water, the harbour lying out flat below the station to the sill stones, and I wrote against that date in the margin of my own tables, rough and half a joke, three words: no tide all day. The coming quarter's tables have that date with no tide all day, set small like the rest, and the trust's works have never yet printed a joke of mine. I have written to the works once about the tables and they answered the gown of the letter pleased to be of service. I am copying out my letter again tonight to ask them plainly. The tide is at the half without any fault I can find in it, and the gauge reads to the glass.
Tonight of the same watch. The trust has written back: not about the letter, ahead of it. They ask for my corrections first this time, ready for the spring volume, word that my figures have never once wanted changing, and the page sent to me to correct is blank where the eighth of March next year stands. The pencil is sharp on the desk. Whatever I put against that day will come printed, that is now what their letter says in as many words. What I have not got the sense of yet, and the watch is long enough for the sense to still be in it, is which of us they mean by first: the man who tells the tides, or the man the tides come for.