The marine club began as snorkelling and became a survey because a visiting marine biologist spent two days here and suggested that a school which goes in the water anyway could count what it sees.
What it does. Four sections of the house reef, marked and fixed so the same water is counted each time. Four counts a year. A one page form the club designed with the biologist, recording live coral cover by eye in bands, fish groups rather than species, obvious bleaching, and anything found on the bottom that should not be there. Students work in pairs and every pair's sheet is kept.
Why it is worth anything. Not because the counting is expert, because it is not. Because it is the same water, the same method and the same form, four times a year, for five years, by a school that is not going anywhere. There is no other record of this reef and there was not going to be one.
The council has quoted the survey twice, once in its own report on the beach cleaning rota and once when asking about the eastern side of the island. The club's five year chart is on the wall outside the hall and every visitor to this school is shown it, usually by a student.
The rules, which are not negotiable. Every student in the club holds a water safety card earned in the school pool programme. Nobody is in the water without two adults and a boat. Sections are swum on a rising tide only. No student touches anything, takes anything or stands on anything, which took a term to establish with thirty one children and is now enforced by the students themselves.
The club also does the part nobody enjoys: four of them enter the sheets into a spreadsheet every quarter, which is a grade eleven student's job and is handed on every year.