Marooned on our paddleboard, awaiting rescue, I ascertained certain things about the ship’s doctor. Firstly, that he wasn’t as awful as I’d first thought. And secondly, that he was incredibly sexy, even without a full complement of limbs.

Drifting in the sea, we had nothing to do but talk. In a nutshell, this is what I gleaned. Brody’s daredevil father had taught him to ride horses and motorbikes, fly planes and to parachute. In his teens he’d ridden with a camel train across a desert. ‘A big desert,’ Brody said, reminding me that Queensland is nearly eight times the size of Great Britain. ‘The correct answer to “Are we there yet?” was generally “No,”’ he explained.

He’d eaten snakes, once used the corpse of a sheep as a sleeping bag, and rowed, naked, in a bathtub down the Brisbane river to raise money for his friend’s kid who had cancer. He spoke Indonesian and Portuguese. He had a black belt in karate. He’d survived an attack from a cassowary, which he said looked like an unusually stupid emu wearing a party hat but was actually one of the world’s most dangerous birds. Growing up in Queensland, he’d got good at dodging crocodiles, too . . . although he was more concerned about crocodiles in uniform, dictating to civilians in war-torn climes.

While we talked, he didn’t do the usual self-obsessed male monologue. He also asked me questions – perspicacious, sensitive questions, about my life, my childhood, my passions. After an hour or so, with cramp setting in, the doctor readjusted his sitting position. As he balanced himself, his hand brushed my flank, giving me an instant jolt of pleasure. My nipples tingled without permission, and I coughed to cover my embarrassment. Brody patted my back gently, and this time not only did my nipples tingle insubordinately but there was also a bit of a cooee from my nether regions. An involuntary shiver shimmied up my thighs and said hello to those eight thousand nerve endings.

Stop it! I ordered my loins. You know how this turned out last time – mortal humiliation and the inability to walk past the ping-pong table in case Wayve has given his mates a detailed description of his trek through your Amazonian rainforest.

But it felt as though we had enough electricity between us to power the broken windsurfer not just back to the beach but on a record-breaking, round-the-world trip. Brody gave me a look that only just fell short of igniting my hair, and I felt myself moving towards his mouth. ‘Wait.’ I stopped abruptly. ‘What about the breach of doctor–patient ethics?’ I gulped.

‘As we’re going to drown at sea, does it really matter?’ he said, smiling roguishly.