Fuvahmulah is the only atoll in the Maldives made of a single island, alone in the far south, and it has no lagoon: the sea goes deep within metres of the beach. That missing lagoon is why nobody could land here for centuries. Boats had to be timed to the swell and driven over the reef, and some capsized. The island kept a dialect other Maldivians still find hard to follow. A harbour was cut into the southeastern shore in the early 2000s, and the deep water at the door gave something back. Tuna are gutted on the quay and the scraps go over the side. The harbour mouth now holds the largest known gathering of tiger sharks anywhere. You settle in a line on the sand a few minutes out of the quay and they come to you, several at once, many past three metres. From March to May the giant oceanic manta, the ocean-going cousin of the reef mantas, comes in to feed and be cleaned here. Scalloped hammerheads school in the same deep water through the northeast monsoon, likeliest from January to March when the channel is calmest.
Above water the island is dished rather than flat, so it holds rain instead of shedding it, and two freshwater lakes lie in the middle. That water grows mangoes, taro and pineapples the rest of the country cannot. One road loops the island under breadfruit, banyan and screwpine, and an hour of it tells you what the photographs never do: hardly any of Fuvahmulah is beach. Afternoons belong to Thoondu, the northern point, where the shore is loose round pebbles rather than sand and families spread out to swim and eat as the light goes. The pebbles clatter and roll under your feet whenever the swell drags back down. At the end of the southwest monsoon the water that once kept everyone off delivers a harvest onto that same shore. Tuna hunting from below and frigate birds from above drive flying fish towards the island, and the whole place comes down to scoop them out of the shallows.