The current was tugging hard at me, so I backed into a deeper crevice. A giant manta ray glided into view on the current, two wrasse attached to its belly. Another shoal of jacks drifted through, with a few tuna in close attendance. And then from out of the deep, beneath me, my first scalloped hammerhead materialized. It was eccentrically beautiful, its streamlined body ending in the alien hammer-shaped cephalofoil, dark eyes positioned at either end to enhance vision. A strange but sophisticated hunter of the deep. It fixed me with a probing, unblinking eye. I could just make out another behind it. For a moment, I stopped breathing — an absolute no-go in scuba — then caught myself and quickly resumed slow, steady inhales and exhales.

From out of the blue, the ocean filled with giant, grey, slow-moving shadows. They took form, a whole school of scalloped hammerheads moving languidly past. I was hooked in, holding steady in the current, relaxed at twenty-six-metres deep, and the ocean was bringing me gifts — life-changing gifts — the ocean’s richest secrets in one of the wildest places on earth.