‘Oh, isn’t that the most magical thing you’ve ever seen?’ Shelly stared at the scene. ‘Excuse me. I have to video this,’ she whispered while ramping up her camera’s setting and turning the program to video. ‘Let’s get behind them, in case any head for the street.’ Seeing the event through the camera made it even more exciting because later, she could share the moment with the special people in her life.

*

Back at her room, she curled her body around Harry’s. Although content, she could not sleep. Too much had happened in the last twenty-four hours. She lay in the dark, eyes wide open, remembering DJ at the airport, Harry at the port, the turtles on the beach, then Gran Gertie came to mind. This was how she must have felt sitting on the old chest against the harbour wall; simply overwhelmed by it all.

After breakfast, Shelly went out with several of the dive team, including Harry and his eldest son, Elias, in the sea research boat.

‘What are we doing today?’ Shelly asked as they rounded the lighthouse.

‘We’ll detect and mark the wreck,’ Harry replied.

She stood next to him and studied the SONAR screen. Soon, the echo-sounder displayed a steady depth of a hundred and seventeen metres. ‘It’s very consistent now, what are we picking up?’

‘The sandy bottom. We should be about . . . ah, yes! Here we are now, a reading of eighty-six metres. We’re over HMHS Britannic right at this moment.’

Shelly’s heart skipped. ‘How thrilling!’ She imagined a frightened, eighteen-year-old Gertie in her drenched nurse’s uniform with the torn apron, and Corporal Perkins’s head resting in her lap as they bobbed about in the overcrowded lifeboat.

‘We’ll drop a line to read the strength of the current at various depths,’ Harry was saying as Shelly pulled herself back to now. ‘When that’s established, we’ll drop an anchor line to the actual wreck and mark it with a buoy to warn passing shipping we have divers down. The Kea Channel’s a busy enough shipping lane. We must work with the local fishermen too. It’s their main fishing territory and they’ve had to abandon it for less prolific fisheries while we prepare for tomorrow. We’ll employ as many of them as we can while the dive’s on.’

‘What can they do to help?’

‘Supply us with over-priced fish to start with.’

Shelly laughed. ‘Public relations, hey? It’s odd to think my great-grandmother almost drowned, and was pulled back into a lifeboat right here, over a hundred years ago. And the ship she worked on is below us right now.’

He read the excitement in her eyes. ‘For the decompression stops on the divers’ return, we’re going to anchor a shot line with several large buoys that will hold vertically in the strong current.’