Published research is a clean story told backwards. These are the pages as written, lightly trimmed for names and nothing else. I think the mess is instructive.
Day 2
Arrived to find the mooring gone. Not damaged — gone. Spent the day running a search grid and found nothing. Reset plan around shore access, which halves the sites we can reach. Morale fine. Coffee situation dire.
Day 9
First proper dive. Visibility poor but the transect line from last year is still pegged and readable, which is a small miracle. Counted for fifty minutes. [COLLEAGUE NAME] found the temperature logger buried under about thirty centimetres of sediment — it has been recording the sediment, not the water, since November. Twelve months of data, probably unusable.
Day 17
Weather. Wrote up. Re-read the logger notes and think we can salvage the first four months by cross-referencing the shallow unit. Not nothing.
Day 26
Best day of the season. Four dives, three sites, everything worked. This is the day that will end up in the talk and it is entirely unrepresentative of the previous three weeks.
“Every conference talk is built from about four good days. It would be more honest to show the other twenty-two.”
Day 31, last entry
Packed. Sixty-one per cent of target samples, one lost logger, one rebuilt engine and a survey line that survived a year unattended. Coming back in March.
