USAT Liberty in the morning slack.

Most divers see the Liberty at nine in the morning, with twenty other divers, in viz that has been ploughed by twenty pairs of fins. We were in the water at 0540, walking out across the black volcanic shingle in the half-dark while the village was still waking up.

The wreck sits twenty metres offshore, parallel to the beach, lying on its starboard side at five to thirty metres. The bow is the deep end. We swam straight out, caught the first plate of hull at five metres, and dropped down it like reading a wall.

There is a bumphead parrotfish school that comes through the wreck at first light. About twenty fish, each the size of a small motorbike, and they pass through the bow section in a column. We were positioned to see them by chance — Faiz had a hunch about the timing — and at 0612 they came. Slow, unhurried, ignoring us. The wreck and the fish at the same scale, both impossible objects.

We worked the bow for twenty minutes, drifted up the spine to fifteen metres, and finished the dive on the coral garden at the stern in eight metres. Sixty-one minutes total. The next boat from the resort was just arriving as we surfaced. The wreck rewards the patient, and the patient at Tulamben means the early.