Thirty one students, four sections, five years of the same form. The council has asked for the eastern section's figures, which is the first time anybody has asked us for anything.
The marine club completed its twentieth survey of the house reef last week, which is five years of four counts a year, and the island council has asked the school for the figures from the eastern section.
That request is worth a notice on its own. When this club started counting, a visiting marine biologist told the students that the value would not be in the accuracy, because a school counting by eye is not expert, but in doing the same thing in the same water with the same form for long enough that a pattern shows. Five years later the council is asking for it, because there is no other record of this reef and there was never going to be one.
What the students do. Four marked sections, swum on a rising tide, in pairs, with a one page form: live coral cover by eye in bands, fish groups rather than species, obvious bleaching, and anything on the bottom that should not be there. Every pair's sheet is kept. Four students enter the quarter's sheets into a spreadsheet, which is a grade eleven job handed on every year.
The rules, since new families ask every year and they are not negotiable. Every student in the club holds a water safety card earned in our own programme. Nobody is in the water without two adults and a boat. No student touches, takes or stands on anything, which took a whole term to establish with thirty one children and is now enforced by the students on each other more firmly than any teacher manages.
The five year chart is on the wall outside the hall. It is worth coming to look at and a student will explain it to you, which they do better than any of us.
And a request. The club has thirty one members from grades seven to twelve and room for about six more. Any family whose child can swim and wants to join should say so on the Monday afternoon. Children who cannot swim yet go into the school swimming programme first, which is free, runs weekly for grades four upwards, and has taught about ninety children to swim properly in the last three years. On an island, that is not a club activity. It is a necessity, and it is the one thing the sea has given this school rather than taken.