Koru docked at eight, three masts twice the height of the grain silos, four hundred phones raised on the wharf, and every headline in New Zealand agreed on the only fact that mattered: "it is not known whether the billionaire was on board." I was on board. I stood at the rail for forty minutes and let them try.

Three centuries of not appearing in things, and finally a country prints it as news.

Koru is Māori for new beginnings, which is to say the Māori word for Day 1, carved beneath a mermaid of Lauren that Legal confirms is the only version of a spouse that cannot file. The Earth Fund wired $25 million this month to protect 625,000 square miles of Pacific, which by coincidence is the water my boat just... fed through. Humans call it conservation; predators call it fencing the pasture before the herd notices what else is grazing.

A tourist on the wharf held her phone up at me for a full minute, frowned at the screen, and told her husband, "There's nobody there." The harbour smelled of diesel and cut kelp, and I wanted, briefly, to wave.

I did not wave. A predator that waves back gets photographed.