Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Gannet Point ·
The Intervals Shrink
Inspection report on the fog signal at Gannet Point, where the silence between blasts has lost one second a month since 1987 and the arithmetic runs out next spring.
- filed: "After the third week of fog"
- reference: "GP/SIG/31"
1. Inspection of the fog-signal station at Gannet Point, held under Schedule 12 of the Harbour Signals Code, in the third unbroken week of fog. The Point stands at the end of the northern arm: grey water, grey iron, rain since first light, the causeway under a hand's depth for the whole visit. I am the examiner of the district. I found the lamp lit and the roster signed.
2. The signal is one horn on an iron tower, siren-blown, commissioned in the spring of 1987 with its characteristic entered on the card: one blast of two seconds, then sixty seconds of silence, repeated. I timed one hundred and twenty cycles at the rail. The blast still holds its full two seconds. The silence between blasts now measures twenty-two.
3. The keepers maintain an interval book, opened at commissioning and continued weekly: date, interval, initials. Its entries run back to 1987 in one unbroken descending line, each month entered one second shorter than the month before, no month missed. The total entered to date is thirty-eight seconds. By the card and the book together, twenty-two remain.
4. I set the two sums side by side, as the form requires. The calendar gives some hundreds of months since the first entry. The book gives thirty-eight. Both cannot be right, and the book does not offer to count calendar months. I asked the principal keeper, Mr. Bream, what months the book counts. He said, the horn's. I asked which months those were. He said he had never had occasion to ask, the book being a book of record and not of explanation.
5. I then examined everything the code permits me to touch: the air receiver, the valve gear, the siren heads, the chronometers, the wiring, and the clock-line to the city. I can report no fault on any of it. The machinery is sound. The horn is not failing. The horn is keeping its book. Where the lost seconds have gone is the one finding of this inspection I cannot explain, and the keepers cannot explain it either. The book, the horn and the fog are agreed upon it, and none of them consulted us.
6. The book's columns are ruled forward, week by week, into next spring. The interval column comes to nought at the line for the twelfth of April. Against that line, ruled square and waiting, stands the word SILENCE in the late foreman's writing, and the book has no entry after it. The foreman who drew those columns died in 1994, and his death was reported in the usual way. I do not know in which year he wrote the word.
7. Under the code, the silencing of a signal requires an order, a public notice and a period of consultation. I have asked the Office for a ruling under that clause, naming no date but the book's. A copy of this report goes at the same time to the Cantor's office in Murrow, under the standing order respecting losses in fog. The Cantor files what is not reported; that is the Cantor's office. In these three weeks the harbour board's list of names has gone from sixty-two to fifty-eight, none reported and four unaccounted, and that figure is not mine to explain. I enter it because the form has a column.
8. Between three in the morning and the third minute past the half, the hour the city calls thin, the keepers count the interval aloud, in a whisper, under an instruction older than the code and not contained in it. I timed the horn across that hour with the fog standing on the rail like wet cloth. The count is the same at three as at noon, but in that hour it takes longer to say, and I have let the practice stand, being for items the code does not provide for and does not forbid.
9. I have signed the certificate: signal serviceable, fit until the twelfth of April by the book's arithmetic, the calendar to conform to the book. That is the procedure and it binds. On the matter of the ruled line I have recommended no works, there being nothing on the station to work upon. The keepers' one question I pass on as asked, on the causeway, with the rain coming through the lamp: when the interval is gone, what will the book count? The Office has not yet replied. This morning on the mail boat my watch ran half a second slow against the station clock, and last month it did not. I have opened a column of my own in my pocket book for the remainder of the season, ruled it to the twelfth of April, and entered nothing in it yet.