The wreck at Tokong Burung is talking again.

We did not expect anything from the dive. The forecast had us at fifteen-knot easterlies and a swell that would have closed Magicienne Rock to anyone with sense. Tokong Burung sits in its lee, which is why we picked it; you take what the weather gives you, and on a Tuesday in April it gave us a slack tide and a window of about forty minutes.

The wreck is not a wreck in the romantic sense. It is the upturned stern of a wooden cargo lighter that went down sometime in the late nineteen-sixties. Half-buried, it sits on a sandy shelf at twenty-eight metres. The wheelhouse is a steel cage of bent uprights, and for the past three monsoon seasons the silt had buried the soft coral that used to grow on it. We dive past it for years without expecting it to be different.

It was different. Where the silt had been, there were small stands of fresh growth — pink soft coral, the size of a thumbnail, rooted on rust. Three lionfish hovered at what would have been the bow. A green turtle finned past, unbothered. And a single hawksbill — narrow beak, scalloped shell — passed over the wheelhouse and was gone in eight seconds. We had not seen one on this site in six years.

We logged it: depth twenty-eight, water twenty-eight, visibility eighteen. We surfaced inside the window and the swell took us back. By the time we were on the boat, the rain had started. None of that mattered. The reef had told us something it had not been willing to tell us in a long time, and the only correct response was to listen.