Reading the Current

There is a line of water off Batu Bolong that appears about forty minutes before slack. It is not dramatic. If you were not looking for it you would call it a shadow, or a patch where the wind sits differently on the surface.

Tide tables are computed for ports. They cannot know that a ridge at right angles to the flow will hold a back-eddy for another twenty minutes, or that northerly wind stacks water into the strait and delays everything. The sea does not run late. Our arithmetic does.

Look for the seam where two textures of water meet. Watch a floating leaf for thirty seconds. Notice which way the mooring lines are lying. The harder lesson is patience: the reef is not going anywhere, and the mantas will not come while the water is still moving.