Transect Nine

The boat leaves Cairns at six and by the time it reaches the outer reef the light has gone from grey to gold to the flat white glare that means you'll be squinting all day whether you like it or not. Marguerite has done this trip forty-one times. She knows the swell at the channel mouth, the way the skipper takes it at an angle. She knows which of the volunteers will be sick (the tall one, he's been quiet since the harbour). She knows, roughly, what she's going to see when she goes in, and that's new. The first eight years she didn't know. That was the point of going. The survey is simple. Fifty-metre tape along the bottom at a fixed depth. Every half-metre, you record what's under the tape. Hard coral, soft coral, algae, sand, rubble. If it's hard coral, which kind, and whether it's healthy, pale, bleached, or dead. You do it at nine sites. You've done it at those same nine sites, on that same tape line, in the same month, every year since 2014. That's the science. It isn't clever. It's just patient. Transect nine is her favourite, was her favourite. A bommie on the outer edge where the water comes in clean from the Coral Sea and the plate corals used to stack up like a dropped deck of cards, browns and greens and one patch of a blue so strange she'd photographed it every year and never got the colour right. She goes in at ten with Kai, who's twenty-six and on his second season and still has the look. The look is the thing you have before you've seen a bleaching year. It's not innocence, exactly. It's the belief that what you're looking at is the baseline. The tape goes out. She takes the slate. Kai takes the camera. Half-metre one: rubble. Two: rubble. Three: algae on rubble. Four: a small Pocillopora, pale, alive. Five: rubble. She marks it. She's marked it before. Two years ago this stretch was 60% hard coral cover. Last year 35, after the summer that went on and on. She'd told the volunteers then, she'd stood on the back deck with her hair dripping and said: it's bad, but the reef's done this before, give it a decade of cool summers and it comes back. She'd believed it. She's not sure whether she'd believed it or whether she'd needed to say it in front of people who'd paid to be there.

Metre twelve is the blue patch. Was. It's white now, a bright bone white with the polyps still in it, still technically alive, starved of the algae that fed them and coloured them. Kai photographs it. Through the mask she can see him looking at it for a long time after the shutter, and she taps her slate to move him on, because that's the job, the job is to move on to the next half-metre. They surface at fifty. Kai pulls his mask up and says, "That's not what the photos from 2019 looked like." "No." "Does it come back?" She's in the water, holding the tape reel, with the boat twenty metres off and the sun on the back of her neck, and she has the sentence ready, the one she's said forty times, and she opens her mouth and it isn't there. "Some of it," she says. "Some sites. Depends on the next three summers." "And if the next three summers are like the last three?" "Then we record what's under the tape." That's all she's got. It isn't nothing. Somewhere in a database in Townsville there's twelve years of half-metre observations from transect nine, and one day someone is going to need to know exactly what was here and exactly when it went, and the only reason they'll know is that she and people like her kept going in. On the deck, drying off, the tall volunteer who was sick asks her what the blue thing was. "Don't know," she says. "Never identified it. Some kind of Acropora, probably. I've got a photo from every year." "Can I see?" She shows him on her phone. 2014, 2016, 2019, 2022. Blue, blue, blue, pale. He scrolls back and forth. "It's beautiful," he says. "It was." "No," he says. "I mean the record. The fact that you've got it. Nobody would know." She takes the phone back. The boat is already turning for the channel. She has three more sites today and she's tired in a way sleep doesn't touch, and the volunteer is right, and she doesn't know what to do with that yet, so she puts the phone in the dry bag and picks up the slate and starts writing up the counts while the numbers are fresh.