Tearii left the platform at twenty minutes past five in the morning, which was earlier than was strictly necessary, but the morning was when the lagoon was at its best for the work, the surface calm before the trade wind came in, the water clear after the night's stillness, the visibility at its greatest depth in the early hours before the plankton concentrated near the surface as the day warmed. He had been leaving at twenty past five for most of his twenty-three years at the farm, the time varying slightly with the season and the conditions, earlier in the calm months of April and May and sometimes later in June when the wind came early and the surface chop made the early start less useful, but on a morning like this one, a morning in August with the sky still full of stars and the lagoon a mirror, the twenty past five departure was the right one.
He had checked the outboard on the previous evening, as he checked it every evening before a morning inspection, the small aluminum runabout that he used for the filière work being a boat that rewarded attention and occasionally gave trouble when that attention was not paid. The engine was a reliable one, an old Yamaha that he had maintained himself for eleven years and that he knew in the way that you know a machine you have worked with in all conditions over a long period, knowing the particular sound it made when it was running well and the other sound it made when something was not quite right, a slightly rougher note that he heard as clearly as another person might hear a change in a voice. The engine was running well this morning, the sound clean as he motored slowly out from the platform across the flat water, the throttle very low, barely above idle, the boat barely making a wake.
The platform was the centre of the farm's operations, a floating barge anchored in the middle of the working section of the lagoon, fitted out with the equipment for the day's work, the cleaning tables and the sorting bins and the tank of filtered seawater for holding oysters during processing, and the tools hung on their hooks in the shed at one end of the platform, the scrapers and the measuring callipers and the flashlights and the regulators and the wetsuits hanging from their pegs in the order he had put them. He had left the platform in this order the evening before, cleaned and arranged for the morning, the tools in their places and the boat tied at the stern, and now he motored away from it in the darkness, the platform lights visible behind him as he moved out across the lagoon toward the first of the filières.