She puts most of her live-animal catch in the firmly piton-secured strapwrack basket “cage”, lightening her load by like 40 kilograms (at least 12 of them belonging to a single enormous snail).

She swims across the river channel without getting swept too far upstream in the process, and trudges back to camp with 70kg of wet mesh-bagged biomass awkwardly hanging on her back, and she dumps all the animals in the seawater tub that this time she filled AHEAD OF TIME, and she’s too tired to do anything other than leave the seaweed samples in a haphazard heap. 

She has a bunch of possible tubers and bulbs that she was really excited to cut open, but not tonight. It’s getting dark and she’s been going for almost thirty hours without a nap.

She plugs her suit into the battery - oh, nice, lots of solar charge while she was gone - and eats a meal bar drizzled with bladdersac syrup, and passes out in her sleeping pod.

Merrin is tired enough to sleep for almost fifteen hours and only wakes up because she's RAVENOUS. She eats another meal bar and is awake for, like, two hours max, and goes back to sleep, and in total manages to spend 25 hours of the 34-hour night passed out. 

On the morning of Day 13, she has a look at her bulbs. 

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

.....None of these are going to be edible raw. The biggest, from the species she's calling "bulbwrack" because it's obviously a relative of the intertidal strapwrack - which, she's guessing, also has root starch storage in addition to the pith at the base of each frond, it's just impossible to get to because it's inside the holdfast root network eaten into the limestone - is the size of her head and weighs almost 4 kg, and is definitely full of complex carbohydrates, but it's also really fibrous. She can probably mash and soak and dry and...something-ify...it into flour, but it's going to be labor-intensive. 

The other two contain more simple sugars and test positive to her strips, but they both have (different) weird pungent odors. Which might be fine! Tons of dath ilan-native plants have pungent odors and aren't poisonous and in fact are considered excellent culinary additions to other foods (onions! ginger!), but that doesn't mean these are definitely okay. 

...Time to process them and culture her gut bacteria on them. And then go scrape pith from the frond-bases that she already knows she can eat, and dismantle and cook and eat the snail she brought up, and take apart the two centipede-worm-fish for the brine-soak step of processing them.  

....Merrin really, really doesn't want to go out again today. She's tired. 

But she's down to 58 meal bars. She's consumed more than half of what she started with.

The very best she can stretch it to now, if she immediately starts getting 6000 calories per planetary-day from local biomass and only has the bare minimum dath ilani rations to definitely cover her micronutrient needs, is 36 planetary days. 

And it really seems like a bad idea to risk the trip when the tidal amplitude is much greater, which by tomorrow it will be. She would have to wait, like, six planetary days. 

And she does not have 36,000 calories of local foodstuffs. 

Is it even worth it, when nothing means anything anyway and she’s causally isolated from any other sapient beings and her laziness cannot possibly hurt anyone but herself 

Come on, the imaginary voice of Kalorm needles her. You’re supposed to be an Exception Handling endurance medtech. Are you saying you can’t handle it?

Her situation is still survivable, the imaginary voice of Laeirthe from her fanfiction points out, more matter-of-factly. And she doesn’t, actually, know how any of this works, or how she ended up here, and so maybe she’s wrong that it’s forever. And staying alive will always, always give more option value than not doing that. And Laeirthe, in her situation, would still be desperate to keep it going as long as he possibly could.

She hasn’t even finished her cool shelter or her awesome doompunk robe, Kalorm reminds her.

Fiiiiiiine she’s dooooooooing it. 

Day 14 is kind of a writeoff. It was already almost noon on Day 13 when Merrin went down the channel and out to sea, the tidal bore didn't roll in until 55:30 – eight and a half hours after sunset – and she didn't actually get back and into bed until the middle of the night. 

But she did add four 15-kg giant snails to her live-catch cage, carefully harvested from four different colony areas kilometers apart, and they weren't the largest individuals from any of them. And she managed to catch one of the weird giant arthropods from the deep sedimental plain. And she got a bunch more of the bulbwrack bulbs, which seemed the most likely to turn out innocuous on her incomplete food-safety testing. 

Merrin is still not sure that she has 36,000 edible calories but she has. A lot. 

She's approaching the third full moon she's observed on this planet.

The spring equinox is coming. 

She's still alive. 

On Day 16, precipitation clouds show up for the first time during the above-freezing part of the day, and it rains all afternoon. Her solar output is unsurprisingly way down - and in fact is zero for part of the afternoon, because it gets violently windy enough that Merrin folds up and covers the solar panels anyway, and is glad of it twenty minutes later when it hails briefly - but it was up to almost 1700 Wh yesterday, and she's been resting in her cave, not using the suit much, and has 3000 Wh banked in the main battery. 

....Merrin's shelter is. A sinkhole. It collects rain drainage. 

However: what if this didn't have to be a bad thing! Merrin moves her cistern outside and rigs up a plastic-sheeting funnel to catch fresh rainwater, and then - what if she temporarily uses all of her remaining waterproof plastic sheeting to make a sort of giant rain-funnel-collector, and collects the runoff to pour into her tub! (Seawater temporarily dumped out, the only thing in there was a giant snail she was planning to butcher and process for eating tonight and tomorrow anyway.) What if that! 

Then she's totally going to fill her entire tub with only-slightly-turbid runoff! And need another if she wants to keep the rest contained rather than just letting it trickle along her floor and down the deeper-cave-entry at the back. 

...Yeah, even non-drinkable freshwater is neat to have for washing her gear and stuff. Merrin can repurpose her empty power armor storage crate as a second water collection receptacle.

(She's at least not very worried about any of her electrically powered stuff or the cables. It also rains in dath ilan, and so Exception Handling gear is designed to be robust to that.) 

The rainwater is coming down almost warm. It may not be the "most" "optimal" use of an unexpected 50-liter bounty of fresh water, but Merrin is going to strip and sit in the tub and take an actual real bath. 

Clean Merrin!!!!!

See, the mental voice of Kalorm whispers to her, aren't you glad you didn't give up and resign yourself to starvation?

You could go dance in the rain naked. Nobody can stop you. 

....Yeah but she would feel really stupid if the sun abruptly came out and she got a really bad sunburn. Also she thinks some UV can still make it through cloud cover. 

Compromise: Merrin will go dance in the rain, but fully clothed. Her clothes need a proper wash anyway and this is the best they're going to get.