Reporting · Dispatch From the Ten Thousand Islands
A Fisherman Who Kept a Tide Journal for Forty Years
His waterproof notebooks now sit in a climate lab in Gainesville, quietly rewriting the Gulf.
Roy Emmert did not intend to leave a scientific record. He intended, in 1984, to remember when the redfish ran. He bought a small waterproof notebook at a bait shop in Chokoloskee and wrote, on the first page, in pencil that has since faded to the color of an old dime: high tide 6:12 a.m., wind SE, four reds, one snook, water clear.
He kept writing for the next forty years. There are, by his count, one hundred and eleven notebooks, stored in a single filing cabinet in a house on stilts at the end of a road that is not on most maps. Every page is dated. Every entry includes the tide, the wind, the water temperature (once he could afford a thermometer), the visibility, and whatever he caught.
In 2022 a graduate student in Gainesville named Priya Rao heard about the notebooks and drove down to see them. She stayed for a week, photographing every page, and left with a hard drive that now sits in a climate lab at the University of Florida. What Roy recorded, without meaning to, is one of the longest continuous private records of a warming estuary in the state. He does not use the phrase 'climate change.' He says the water is 'different from how it used to be.' It is, of course, the same thing, described by a man who does not need the phrase.