A moment that changed me: I dived into the shadows of a shipwreck – and saw the 5ft turtle that altered everything
A leatherback turtle, the largest of all sea turtles. Photograph: By Wildestanimal/Getty Images
It just floated there, a turtle huddled in the black corner of the wrecked ship’s bow. Its head, melon-sized and scaled, was about all I could see, as it dipped in and out of the torch beam. My partner and I were in Barbados in 2023 on a holiday we could barely afford but had booked through a veil of grief, after the death of my mother-in-law eight months before.
The death came with a laborious house sale, orphaned dog and family feuds. This trip was an escape from the loss and shock. We learned how to scuba dive between sunburn sessions. As an anxious individual, diving is as close as I have ever come to genuine peace – the enforced isolation and unquestionable surrender to the slow and the still.
It was on the last of our dives, when the reality of our lives back home was clawing at the door, that we saw it. I initially assumed the giant, blinking green turtle before me was plastic, put there by the tourist board. Then its head turned and it looked straight at me, tilting in the torch light. It was prehistoric and petrifying.
I had never considered that turtles this big existed. As it shifted in the shadows, its true, colossal size was revealed – it was about 1.5 metres (5ft) in length, and 1 metre across. A veritable monster, trapped in a wreck at the bottom of the ocean. All my training deserted me, and I screamed a mixture of fear and awe into my oxygen regulator. The creature pivoted, moving towards us. I pushed back, out of the bow and into the open deck. My partner’s eyes found me, stunned.
Finally, the beast burst out to join us. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. The turtle and I, now chest to chest, ascended together. I experienced pure euphoria, with all the confusion, awe and fear that entails. We entered into a kind of odd aqua waltz between man and beast. Time appeared to have stopped.
As it turned, it revealed its shell, allowing me to run a palm over its rough surface. Floating there in the deep, I was forced to engage in the world as it was; to simply see and breathe. In this age of constant noise and distraction, it felt like a divine act to be put on mute. We pulled back and the turtle swam on. It faded gently into the infinite blue oblivion.
When we surfaced, it hit me like the Caribbean breeze that I had, in that brief moment, been altered. Surprisingly, for an agnostic, the first thing that came into my mind was God, or the notion of God. I thought back to my childhood, those early years of soft indoctrination; with hymns in school assemblies, and watercolour pamphlets, displaying bearded white saints doing good deeds, handed out at Sunday school.
In true Irish style (my grandmother was from Belfast), my parents raised me Catholic, albeit non-committedly. We attended church out of guilt, not faith. For me, it fizzled out when I was about 12. Only after my encounter with the turtle did I finally understand what they had been banging on about. That the form of faith I had been offered as a child was just a stand-in for the real deal, a seat-filler for the raw truth: that all the strange wonder, complexity and mystery of spirituality was already here, all around us, thriving in nature. And that, for a fleeting moment at least, was embodied in a single, perturbed turtle.
Our moment together became a lesson in remaining open to awe. It soothed our grief, too, bringing a fresh awareness that life, in all its forms, goes on. I often think about the turtle; it’s become a sort of screensaver in my mind. The story has become a comforting, personal meditation to keep life in perspective. And there I was, thinking we were just going on a beach holiday.