Does one ‘bale out' or ‘bail out'? In this case, the man in the photo is bailing out as in he is using a pan to move water from a ditch. If I were a writer for the Guardian I'd probably be in hot water now as their style guide prefers the ‘bale' spelling for removing water. But the Guardian is just wrong on this point. The English ‘bail' derives from the French for bucket, ‘baille'. Anyway, this was a photo I took from the Li river in china. I couldn't tell if he was removing water from somewhere or adding water the somewhere. The boat I was on sailed by and the man passed from view.
A man uses a small pan to bail water out of a ditch or to water plants growing above the ditch. In the foreground are recently harvested rice paddies while in the background are the karst limestone hills familiar of the area around Guilin, China.
