A sailboat seen from underwater, Armando said, looks like a shark upside down — because of the keel. He would know. He photographed both, often from two or three feet away, and he said he preferred the boats because they were more dangerous.

For decades he shot the BVI Spring Regatta & Sailing Festival from inside the course. His method was simple and slightly unhinged: he jumped from the committee boat, swam to the marker buoy, popped up as the fleet came through, and fired with a wide-angle lens. He called it shooting from the heart — putting the camera as close to the subject as the subject would tolerate, and sometimes closer than that. The style started at the first Rolex regattas in St. Thomas. It carried over when he moved to Tortola, and it carried on for forty years.

“A regatta unfolding from the only place almost no one has ever seen it from.”

The Pyewacket story is the one people ask about most. It was her first time racing the BVI Spring Regatta. Armando wanted a specific angle, the light was wrong, he swam hard to reposition, and a shape he took for a shark came at him fast through the blue. It was Pyewacket’s counter keel. The crew saw it coming and screamed his name across the wind. He made the frame. He surfaced. It became one of his best.

The photographs in this chapter are about that relationship — the photographer in the water and the boats moving through it at twelve knots. A bow cutting water at the lee rail. A spinnaker ballooning against the green hills of Norman Island. A regatta unfolding from the only place almost no one has ever seen it from.