A 10-minute rib ride over waves gleaming like crumpled tinfoil has brought us to the lee of a small green island, where sea people are waiting. Fifteen bob in open water, a dozen more float head up in a patch of kelp. “That lot are sleeping,” says our skipper and guide, Lewis Johnson. “Leave them be – they won’t be aggressive but there’s no need to startle them. You’ll see others snoozing on the bottom.”
We kit up, drop over the side and swim through a noodle-soup of seaweeds: mustard-coloured strands of thongweed stroke my cheeks and chin, the only skin exposed to the chilly Atlantic. Weeds of other colours – crimson, bronze, gold and bright green – shelter fleets of tiny fish, larger yellow wrasses and compass jellyfish, harmless enough and enigmatically beautiful.
