Less than an hour earlier, I had hauled my tired limbs from the warmth of my bunk, hopeful of a great dawn dive. But as I entered the water, I felt betrayed by my optimism.

Goosebumps. It was cold. Too cold. Thirty minutes in I began to lose feeling in my feet and decided it was time to head to the five-metre mark for my safety stop. A few sharks escorted me on my ascent, phasing in and out of the murky morning. The next three minutes felt like a trans-Atlantic flight in the twilight zone.

As I bobbed in the water waiting for the zodiac to arrive, I pondered the unusually poor conditions and cursed my morning optimism. The diving around San Benedicto Island in the central Pacific Ocean is typically a lot more pleasant.

Ready for a warm shower and breakfast back aboard the Solmar V liveaboard, I began to peel off my wetsuit. As I reached for my zipper, a frantic voice rolled across the deck, thunder across a prairie. “False orcas!” a man shrieked. “False orcas!”

Adrenaline.

Chaos.

I searched desperately for my fins and, plucking my camera from the rinse tank, threw myself onboard the zodiac in a manner that must have looked like I had been doing it my whole life. We set off in pursuit of the pod.

The previous week, I had set sail with the Solmar V into the Sea of Cortez to avoid Hurricane Aletta, which was projected to hit Revillagigedo Marine Park, North America’s newly expanded, and now largest, marine park. During the exploratory trip into the Gulf, we encountered a pod of wild, transient orcas moving south along the Baja Peninsula. We spent the better part of a day snorkelling with them. It was one of the best wildlife encounters of my life.

Once the hurricane passed, I had boarded the last trip of the season to the magnificent Revillagigedo, also known as Socorro. And now, hardly a week later, I was once again in pursuit of a pod of ‘killer whales’.

As we sped through the water, I gazed out at the rugged volcanic backdrop and could finally feel the warmth of the rising sun’s rays on my cheeks. Adventure was in the air. Seawater slapped at our faces, but no one cared, fixated instead on the large pod up ahead. I could see the water visibility improving as we moved farther from the dive site. We were now in the blue, the deep blue.