The landscape looks arid, mountainous and with a partially grey sky only occasionally revealing green peaks in the distance. The climate feels something like the Caribbean, warm and exceptionally humid although windy. The ocean is a richer blue than I have seen anywhere else in the world. I’ve just landed on Saint Helena Island, a dot in the south Atlantic and a place that I have fantasised about exploring for several years. It’s a place that I want to capture from every perspective; atop the waves, beneath them, from the air and chasing landscapes.

Local people have come to watch our plane land – it’s a popular pastime here, I later learn. The island’s airport has been in operation for three years and before its completion one would had needed to arrive and depart by sea, a fabulous sounding journey of at least a week. Only pilots trained for an “unusual landing approach” and “unusual local weather conditions” are qualified to land here.

Jamestown, which is in the north of the island and my base for a week looks out to the ocean from a deep laceration in the surrounding cliffs and feels to me the warmest part of the island. It can be baking hot here yet cool. Sometimes it rains on the south side but not enough rain to sustain decent agriculture – most of the island’s food is imported monthly. Currently, Internet connection on the island is received by satellite only and is expensive to use, so with pleasure I leave my mobile phone in my hotel room for the most part.

On the map I can see plenty of wrecks to visit around the island. I’m looking for the Chilean devil ray, whale sharks and anything else passing by that falls into the megafauna category. Saint Helena is a mere mark on the navigational chart I’m studying over coffee; the nearest continent is around 1600 miles away to the east, and to the west? Eventually one would find South America. This is one of the most remote populated island destinations in the world.

Apart from us few visitors from the air, several sailors stop here to resupply. A sailor I meet at the hotel tells me of her recent rough Atlantic crossing from South Africa, and how she’s here to gain internet access before making off for Brazil; every visitor I meet has an interesting story to tell. I spend an afternoon sailing around the island with a resident French seafarer who gives me a different perspective of the island from further out to sea, amplifying its remote location.

The weather changes frequently over the island – I feel like I experiences three warm seasons in the space of a day. On morning two, as I walk down to catch a boat, the weather shifts from light rain, black cloud then breaking away to bring sun. I am heading out to sea to freedive with whale sharks. These giants patrol a specific spot east of the Saint Helena’s wharf and it’s thought that they come here to breed. This theory is based on the island’s marine biologists collecting records of an almost equal number of both males and females. It’s believed that this is an aggregation seen seldom anywhere else in the world, if at all to date. Tagging and monitoring programs are in progress here, and the whale shark is “one of the islands key species”, according to Rhys Hobbs, the local marine conservation officer with whom I spend some time with while on Saint Helena. His team started the whale shark research alongside Georgia Aquarium around six years ago.