When the three-week stint on the PNG Explorer came to a close and we were steaming back to port we stopped off for a swim at a beautiful little island to break up the journey. While we were all just chilling out and relaxing after surfing ourselves silly over the last few days of the trip the notion of retouching the small splash out of the best image we had managed to achieve was bought up, and again I dismissed it. I feel if I went down that path I would be robbing my audience of an amazing story and cheating the ‘one in a million shot’. But more importantly I would be robbing myself of the opportunity to go back and try again.

I think if you ran this trip through several times over, most times you would fail to get the perfect photograph. But that only makes the time when it does happen even sweeter. To explain why I want to keep going it is easiest to relay a conversation that happened in the surf one morning between Darty and myself. We were both exhausted, had been up burning the candle at both ends for several days in a row, when, in the half light of morning Darty pulled into an epic tube and I got a single frame off that looked like the timing and light was right. While he paddled back past me to the take off spot I was adjusting my camera settings in preparation for the next wave. Darty smiled and said: “How ridiculous are our lives, we’re both at work right now!” As I set up for the next shot, floating in the 30 degree water as the sun started to break the horizon, I laughed to myself and realised that it really didn’t matter if we didn’t get the shot that day. Both of us were having so much fun that we, no matter what, were going to keep trying and if we did that, if we kept trying then the million to one odds would continue to swing in our favour with every wave.

Before I go I need to say thankyou to a few people. There are a lot more involved than just Darty and myself. Firstly Andrew and Jude Rigby who own the PNG Explorer are the real stars of this show, without them none of this would have been possible. Then of course there is the crew, Neil, Malakai, Nelson, Pennyais, Hilde, Irene, Joy and Johnny Switch Foot. They kept the boat running and made no bones about getting up well before their normal call of duty to ensure I could photograph in the dark. And of course the guests aboard the Explorer who allowed me to surf and photograph with them during my time in PNG.