Like many adventurers before him, Phil Sammet’s journey began on a boat. The Don Jose measured 80 feet long, carried 16 passengers, and followed a slow, steady course, nearly 300 miles around the Baja peninsula in search of whales. This was his chance to see the sea and follow in the footsteps of his hero. Ever since childhood, “Little Phil wanted to be Jacques Cousteau.” So, in 1984, he took what savings he had from working odd jobs and embarked on a journey. What made this pleasure cruise unique was neither the whales nor the people that watched them. It was the moment the ship began to sink.

Ten miles offshore, a sharp ‘thunk’ resounded through the ship. The engine’s single shaft had snapped, cracking the hull. Water was leaking through faster than the pumps could handle. The voyagers had two options: fix the leak, or swim. Luckily, two passengers came prepared. Phil Sammet and Alan Studley, a dive instructor in Monterey Bay, had brought wetsuits. Though it was not the relaxing swim they hoped for, they hopped overboard. These were the moments that made stories. Armed with nothing more than a mop, a pair of scissors, and a spatula, the pair began to work. Over and over, they felt their way across the splintered boards of the wounded ship and wedged mop strings into the crack. The leak slowed before they ran out of mop.

Finally stable, they contacted a nearby shrimp trawler and reached an agreement. The trawler would tow them to safety on the condition that they bought its catch at a premium, one they did, in fact, eat in its entirety.

Three days later, the voyage found sanctuary on the shores of Cabo Pulmo; a desert oasis that Cousteau once described as the “aquarium of the world”. It was there, freediving among tornadoes of fish on the northernmost coral reef in the Eastern Pacific, that Studley asked Sammet if he would like to learn to scuba dive. A year after the trip, Studley was teaching Sammet to dive in Monterey Bay. He had never so much as snorkelled in California and his first dive was a turning point. Beneath the blue-green waves, Sammet found paradise in the form of a forest.

The majesty of a kelp forest can be difficult to grasp. From the surface, it is an unassuming brown tangle bobbing in the swell. Below, it is a tapestry of life; a darkened cathedral with golden light filtering through the floating fronds. Gas-filled pneumatocysts buoy the kelp to the surface to photosynthesize, while root-like holdfasts anchor it to the seafloor. This unique biology makes kelp forests one of the few truly three-dimensional ecosystems humans can easily explore. Juvenile fish flit in and around the canopy, cryptic invertebrates make their homes in the tangled holdfasts, and an array of seals and sea lions zoom through the space in between. These miraculous forests are found in temperate waters worldwide, but California’s are among the most iconic because they are so easy to access.

When Sammet first dove the Monterey Peninsula, it was blanketed with 2,700,000 square metres of lush and healthy kelp canopy. That meant 2,700,000 square metres of delicious lingcod, playful sea lions, and massive sunflower sea stars. After two decades languishing in city suburbs, it was a revelation to Sammet: “The natural world, not the cyber world or the civilized world, is the only real world. And we’re all living in it. It’s the only one that’s important.”