How Selkie Started: A Rat-Infested Cabin and a Leap of Faith

I almost didn't go.

The travel agency had mixed up the dates, the spacious cottage over the ocean was gone by the time the mess was sorted out, and what was left was a cabin in the middle of the jungle that turned out to be comprehensively rat-infested. I know this because I spent several nights listening to the evidence. I went anyway, because I had come to Raja Ampat to dive and the diving would be the same regardless of what was happening on the floor at 3am.

What I didn't expect was the group.

Because of the booking mix-up, there were only seven of us, three couples and me, the youngest by some distance and the only one who had shown up alone. The women were older, warm in the way that some people are warm without making a performance of it, and somewhere between the first dive and the last night on Kri Island they told me they believed in what I was trying to build. Not politely. With the kind of confidence that comes from women who have spent enough years in wetsuits that don't fit to know exactly what I was talking about. That was the moment Selkie stopped being an idea I was turning over in my head and became something I was actually going to do.

What Raja Ampat looks like underwater

The diving was everything the cottage floor was not. Bamboo sharks resting on the sand, mantas moving through the water with the kind of unhurried authority that makes everything else seem slightly frantic by comparison, and everywhere the small strange critters I love most about diving, the ones that require you to slow down and actually look. I took photographs I am still proud of.

And then there was the night dive. I have done a lot of night dives and this was the best one, by enough of a margin that I did it twice, which is not something I have ever done before or since. I cannot fully explain what made it different except that everything was exactly right in a way that diving sometimes is and you cannot manufacture. On one of those dives, in the dark water off Kri Island, I saw my first seahorse. I have been diving long enough that first sightings are rarer than they used to be.

The week I came back

I came home from Raja Ampat with photographs, a list of marine life I had finally ticked off, and the quiet certainty that Selkie was worth building. Six strangers in a jungle cabin had looked at what I was trying to do and said yes, that is exactly what is missing, and that is not nothing.

The week after I got back, they let me go from my job.

I wasn't even happy there. Looking back, it was the last thing standing between me and actually doing this, and it removed itself. I sat with it for about a day and then got to work.

The rats were terrible. I would go back tomorrow.

Selkie is being built now. If you want to follow the process and be first to know when the suits are ready, the founding list is where it starts.