Archived report · 3 min read · Set in Gannet Point ·
The Corridor of Floats
A pier maintenance diving log reads every float line at 33 metres at dawn and standard by noon, spring survey after spring survey.
- filed: "After the spring survey"
- reference: "GP/DV/44"
1. Report of the pier maintenance dive section, Gannet Point, filed after the spring survey, covering the night dawns of the season and the survey's finding on the float lines, kept under this reference for the pier's whole service and continued from the file before it.
2. The pier carries its mooring floats on lines run out from the head at intervals through the tidal corridor. Standard practice is a renewing schedule: lines of standard length, renewed on rotation, buoyed, and marked to the metre with service knots. Lines measured this spring and enter into record: nine.
3. The anomaly is in the dawn measure. Between first light and roughly the hour of low water, every line at the pier, measured wet by diver or dry by crane hoist, returns thirty-three metres. By noon the same lines return their standard lengths, and the standard lengths differ — the survey's nine lines run from nineteen metres to sixty-one — and the noon measure agrees with the ledger, and the ledger has agreed with the noon measure for the whole term of this file.
4. The dawn measure does not agree with anything. It agrees with itself.
5. The section therefore took steps. Lines of non-standard length were renewed. New marks were cut in the corridor head. The measuring back-line itself was laid new, of rope calibrated against the harbour chain, by a dived surveyor and an officer with the board — two hands on every measure, one senior, one junior, the practice of this file. On the first dawn after renewal all nine lines measured thirty-three metres again. The back-line, measured between its own marks on the same dawn, held its true length. Only the corridor lines changed, and only at dawn, and only up to thirty-three.
6. A line of nineteen metres cannot hold thirty-three metres of water between the same two bollards. The survey notes this plainly, because the recording officer of the file before this refused to note it plainly, and his refusal is the reason the file has the note now. The dawn corridor is not a longer distance between the same points. It is, for the interval of one dawn per day, a different corridor with its own length, and the piers' lines are measured at whatever length that corridor keeps, and the length it keeps is thirty-three.
7. The section searched for the visitor's explanation offered each season, that the fleet's nets or the spring survey's own gear foul and bow the lines at slack water. There is no gear in the corridor at first light. The northern banks are closed until the season opens past Gannet. Water at slack cannot bow a taut line longer without the line losing its marks, and the marks hold at dawn, and they hold simply.
8. Taken for the record and against future reference: at dawn the corridor depth under the third float reads deeper than the chart by eleven metres at spring tide, and the lead comes up cold beyond the custom of the bay, and the third float's ring is the only one of the nine that never wears.
9. Recommend the schedule continue. The dawn measure is entered in the dive log alongside the noon measure and the two ledgers are kept apart, per the file before, per the file before that, as far back as the pier office holds records, which is further than the pier. No theory is offered. The sea keeps its hours as well as its lengths, and the section has not been asked, this season, to work the corridor past first light.