I do site surveys and my notes get rained on maybe once a month. Currently using a standard blue that turns into a watercolour the moment a drop lands. Pen is an extra fine steel nib and realistically I clean my pens every three or four weeks, not weekly. Paper is a normal notebook, not the waxy waterproof stuff. What have you used that actually survives water and does not turn an EF into a paperweight?
Pigment inks are the answer to the water question and the caveat to everything else. Platinum Carbon Black and the Sailor pigment inks sit on the paper as suspended particles rather than dye, so once dry they do not move for anything.
The honest downside for your use case: pigment ink that dries in a feed is a genuine job to remove, not a rinse. If you are cleaning every three or four weeks and you use the pen daily, you will probably be fine, because pigment inks mostly cause trouble in pens that sit unused. If the pen goes in a drawer for a fortnight between site visits, you will regret it.
Can confirm the regret. Left Carbon Black in a pen over a three month project break and spent an evening with a bulb syringe, an ammonia solution and eventually an ultrasonic bath. The pen survived. My patience did not.
The pen is in use nearly every day, so that risk profile is fine. Ordering a bottle.
I ran this test because I got tired of arguing about it. Twelve inks, same paper, swatched, left twenty four hours, then held under a running cold tap for thirty seconds each.
Gone entirely: most standard blues and every washable ink.
Smeared badly but legible: several blue blacks that claim water resistance.
Basically untouched: the two pigment blacks, and the document inks in the De Atramentis range.
Interesting middle: iron gall inks lost some of the blue dye component and left a grey black line that was completely readable.
For field notes, legible after water is the bar, not pristine, and that widens your options a lot.
Legible after water rather than pristine is the right bar and it is the bit people miss when they demand bulletproof. A grey ghost of your original line is a survey note. A blue cloud is not.
One workflow note. Whichever you land on, carry a second pen with an ordinary ink for anything you have to hand to somebody else, because the permanent stuff is unforgiving about mistakes on forms. Ask me how I know.
Disagreeing with the pigment recommendation for an extra fine specifically. Pigment particles and a very tight feed channel are not a happy combination, and an EF already runs drier than everything else. I would either move to a Fine for the field pen, or accept an iron gall which is a solution rather than a suspension and behaves like a normal ink in the feed. Alternatively keep a pencil for the wet days, which is the answer half the surveyors I know landed on.
Test on your actual notebook before committing to a bottle. Coated and clay-heavy papers can leave water resistant inks sitting on the surface for a very long time, and an ink that has not dried is not waterproof no matter what the label says. Write a line, wait a minute, drag your thumb across it. That is the whole test.
@weekend_margin · 2mo ago
Iron gall is the traditional answer for exactly this job and the modern ones from Rohrer und Klingner behave far better than the horror stories suggest. Salix and Scabiosa write beautifully, darken on the page, and shrug off water. Two rules: do not leave them sitting in a pen for months, and flush the pen properly when you change ink. I would not put them in a vintage pen or anything with unknown metals, but a modern steel nib is fine.
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