There are three elements that enable a designer to turn a blank sheet of paper into something wonderful. The first is his innate creative ability. The second is information. The third is time. Out of the three, time is the element that he has the least influence over, yet time is essential for him to be able to use the other two effectively. I’m not talking about billable time here. I’m talking about thinking time. Thinking time is different than billable time.

Cape Town is only a two-hour flight from Durban but it’s a world away in terms of climate. Only a few short days ago in Umkomaas on the East African coast, we were able to bask in the sunshine between dives, but on the southern tip of the continent, the warmth comes from more artificial means as coats and woolly hats are dragged from the depths of our rucksacks and hastily pulled over our shivering bodies. Of course not everyone dislikes the cold. The world’s most efficient killing machine absolutely loves cooler water and it’s him that we’ve come here to meet.

At 4.40am on Saturday 23rd April, I helped eleven other bleary-eyed divers check over 750 kilos of dive gear, camera equipment and personal effects onto a flight to San Jose Cabo at the southern end of Mexico’s Baja peninsula. We did this with some trepidation as our luggage was about to take a journey of several thousand miles via Nassau, Miami and Dallas Fort Worth before finally making its way down to Mexico. To our relief, everything arrived safely, and the following day we loaded the gear onto yet more transport and drove three hours north across an arid and cactus covered plain to the port of La Paz where we boarded the Nautilus Explorer, a 35-metre custom-built dive vessel that would take us out into the Pacific and the legendary Revillagigedo Islands.

The word “branding” is one of the most overused and misunderstood in business. Ask someone to tell you what a brand is and most will describe something visual – a logo, a label or an ad campaign. It’s a logical response, but the visual side of branding – the wonderful stuff we see around us every day – is only part of the story. If you really want to understand branding, you need to look deeper and go back several steps.

Picture St. Ouen’s Bay when the surf is pumping. Now double the size of the swell and imagine trying to launch a seven metre rubber boat full of dive gear through it. Welcome to Aliwal Shoal. The surf-launches on this part of the African coast are the stuff of diving legend, and we were about to experience it first hand. On command, we scrambled aboard the boat and pushed our feet into the straps while the skipper played cat and mouse with the waves, looking for an opening in the surf. Running parallel to the waves he suddenly gunned the engines and we held on for dear life as the boat crashed through the surf and out into open ocean.