South Georgia is the most well-known of the Falkland Islands, also called Islas Malvinas. It lies nearly at the end of the world in the Southern Atlantic Ocean. To find this place on the map, draw an equilateral triangle with one vertex on Cape Horn and another on the Antarctic Peninsula. The third vertex in the east is our destination.

It’s an unsettled kind of morning on Chedabucto Bay of Canada’s east coast. The sun is shining—it’s really quite pleasant—but there’s a brisk wind blowing from the southwest. What that translates into here in the waters between Cape Breton Island and Nova Scotia is heavy seas. We’re pounding through four to six foot swells in a 25-foot rigid hull inflatable boat.

Long after the jet lag and the first day back to work, you slip into your favorite dive T-shirt eager to keep the essence of your most recent underwater experience pulsing through your mind and body. Proudly wearing large print logos across your chest is a way of celebrating your passion for diving and sharing it with the rest of the world.

I first spoke with Sheck Exley in the summer of 1991. I had begun publishing aquaCORPS: The Journal for Technical Diving, a year earlier and I was working out of the office at Capt. Billy Dean’s dive shop in Key West, Florida, the first technical diving training center in the United States. “Technical diving”, a term we had just coined to describe this new style of diving, was just in its infancy.