‘Yep,’ Jem said. ‘It’s one of those classic Tassie stories, you know. My parents were real Blue Mountains greenies, and they’d come down for the Franklin blockade. Next thing they knew, Mum was pregnant with my older sister, and Dad, not sure what else to do, pulled some weird deal at the pub, where he traded their old caravan, which they’d been living in—like really scumming it—for an ab licence because he needed to be able to scrape together a living, because of the baby, you know? And then, before they knew it, they were living on the east coast of Tassie and he was diving his arse off, and they had a house, and then me,’ Jem trailed off.

I noticed even then that there was something a bit defensive in the way he told the story. Like he was trying to make sure I didn’t think of him as a kid of some fat-cat investor who plundered the coast for cash. They fell into it because they had to, and despite their vocation and the random luck of their wealth, they’ve never forgotten their hippy roots; that’s the story Jem and his family tell of themselves.

The boat we were sitting in was an aluminium tinny, probably only fifteen feet long.

‘You don’t work out of this boat, do you?’ I asked him. It didn’t seem big enough.

‘This one? Nah,’ Jem said, laughing. ‘This is just mine, for pottering about.’

We didn’t find any dolphins, but we did find birds: hundreds and hundreds of terns and mutton-birds, wheeling and veering, swarming above a bait ball like bees. The sky was clotted with them. There were albatrosses too, carving through the flock at surprisingly low speeds, rising and falling on scarcely discernible pockets of breeze, barely giving way to the gannets that dropped from thirty metres above to pierce the deep-water turquoise, which was boiling with fish.

‘This is fucking amazing. There’d be tuna out here for sure!’ Jem’s eyes were gleaming and it was like the energy in the sky burst forth to mirror him. While we watched the birds do their thing, the sun tore through the gauzy sheet of cloud, just as the billows Jem had pointed out earlier moved in. They verged the sun and the edging blackness turned its light a piercing gold and the sea the colour of orange juice. For a moment, the layers of colour stacked in a complete arc over us: orange, black, gold, grey and orange again.

‘How’s this light?’ Jem gushed. ‘Sometimes, when you spend every day out here, it’s like it all just turns into humdrum background, but then the sun hits it slightly differently and your whole perception gets blown out of the water, and you just think: Is there anywhere more beautiful? Anywhere you’d rather be?’

It was utterly spectacular—still to this day one of the most spectacular skies I’ve seen. There was nowhere I would have rather been in that moment, but before I could tell him, his attention shifted from the sky back to the bait ball.