“You scour the coastline. You're searching for the perfect geography, the best combination of headland and bay creating the longest breaks. You extrapolate the sea bed, analyse the currents and prevailing winds, account for the time of year, the time of day, the phase of the moon. After all that you're faced with a succession of waves, picking one to try and ride. Hard work and preparation pay off but you never have all the data and couldn't synthesise it if you did. After a bad day you need to remember the part fate plays. Tell yourself it's a chaotic playfield, outwith your control, but of course when things go well it's all pride and you look around those watching, trying to discern who shares your joy and who shimmers with jealousy.

Finance: it sucks you in or it spits you out. The hours are long but there's never enough time to take in all the data, all the news. And news is never neutral. It's good or it's bad and like the ocean it's relentless. The sea is never calm. Even when it appears so there's always movement, the ripples and flows you can barely perceive and then the myriad forces from below and above, pushing and pulling, whose effects are inevitable but the approach of which only the sharpest of eyes can see.

There's a coup in Guinea-Bissau, a war in Georgia, Erdogan wins the election, interest rates change, house prices fall, Aramco strikes oil, or doesn't, Japan signs a trade deal, a CEO resigns, consumer confidence slumps, one company sues another for intellectual property infringement. There are all these thousands of variables you have to take into consideration. A butterfly flaps its wings in the US housing market and there's a hurricane on your screen.

These flutterings, these fluctuations, three or four per cent might not sound like much, but when you control a fund worth half, or three-quarters of a billion pounds that could mean a twenty-five million loss. In one day. When something like that happens it's hard not to hit the drink, and if the three or four per cent is in your favour? Well, then you hit the drink. There's always a reason to be drinking. Like I said, the sea is never calm.

I started out in the aftermath of the dot-com bubble. The bubbles don't burst though, I've always hated that analogy. It's not a pop. It's not like receiving a phone call saying your great aunt's died. You don't simply go to the funeral then get on with your life. The adverse effects last months, years, all the while you're trying to stem the bleeding. You're the doctor and the patient, both performing the operation and enduring the rehabilitation. After the recovery I did okay for a few years, things were going well, life was more or less good. Then came two thousand and seven.”

Finally he stopped talking and simply stared into the bottom of his highball, swirling the glass and watching the ice cubes dance with the lime. He paused for a second, his eyes glazing over, before shooting the dregs and slamming it on the table.

“Fancy another?”

I still had half a bottle of Gallo left so passed up his offer and watched him head to the bar to mix a Botran and Coke.

Jason was the owner of the hotel I was staying at, Hotel Solera in the Guatemalan port of Livingston, a lively town where the Rio Dulce meets the Gulf of Honduras. I was the only guest but liked it there, both the hotel and the town. The atmosphere wasn't like anywhere else in Guatemala but that was no surprise as it was almost cut off from the rest of the country. The only way in or out was by boat, the jungle too dense to be penetrated. In the old days teak and mahogany floated down the river alongside barges bearing the names of Dole and Del Monte. Eventually Livingston's port couldn't handle the traffic or the increasing draught of the ships, so nearby Puerto Barrios was built. There was no need for Livingston any more but after a century on the slide recovery began. Instead of barges loaded with pineapples, the harbour now contained American yachts, moored during rainy season to shelter from the hurricanes bombarding their usual homes in more exposed parts of the Caribbean. Those seeking refuge had given the town a new life. Ebbs and flows as Jason might say.

He walked back from the bar with his new drink perched between three fingers of his right hand while his left hung at his side, grasping the neck of the bottle of rum. He sat down, took a generous swig, and continued his story, but not from where he'd left off.

“I had a Lamborghini you know. Only used it at weekends. I never used to be into cars, maybe I'm still not. At university I drove a Fiat Punto. Eventually though, when you start making money you wonder why you're driving a piece of shit that only has a couple of MOTs left in it. So you get a better one, nothing too fancy but something to treat yourself with. For me it was a Passat. Nobody's impressed though, you're proud of it, but nobody else looks twice. So you get a better one, and a better one. What's the point in this money, this success if you're still bottom of the heap? Of course I wasn't bottom of the heap, I was making far, far more than I do now, but when you look around the office that's how it feels. So I ended up with the Lamborghini. It was the same with watches, suits, flats, country retreats. You can't walk around with your bonus cheque on display as proof of your value, you have to transform it into glitz. Then you see the guy at the top of the tree on a golf day. He's the only one truly relaxed, the only one truly happy. He knows he's at the top, we all know he's at the top, he doesn't need to prove it, he's not competing. And his watch? One of these.”

Jason tapped his left wrist twice where he wore a Casio F91-W. You know, the cheap digital one you probably had when you were at primary school. I glanced at my own, a Boss Orange I'd won in a raffle and wondered what it said about me.

“I got this when I quit, before I moved out here. Four pounds it cost. So cheap, so reliable that terrorists use it in time bombs. My old watch, I think it was a Patek or a Hublot, I sold. I sold it along with the Lamborghini, the flat, my closet. I didn't actually have much in the bank by that point. I was entrusted with the stewardship of thousands of people's pensions but I didn't have one of my own. After the monthly payments most of what was left went down my throat or up my nose. You wouldn't believe the money we spent.”

“And now here you are.”

“Yeah, now here I am.” said Jason, followed by a large gulp of Botran. The twin doors that lead to the shore were pinned open letting the night air cool the stifled room. Jason gazed beyond the hotel and into the gulf, his flip-flop slowly tapping against the tiled floor. I finished my beer and sat it on the table. Always the host, Jason was alert to it.

“You want another? Here, let me fix you a rum.”

“No thanks, I need to be up early tomorrow.”

“You sure?”

“Yup, I've a boat to catch, the next won't be until Thursday.”

“Oh right, Honduras.”

“I'm pretty excited actually. Hopefully I can get a couple of weeks good surf in before the weather turns bad.”

“It's May now, the rain won't be too far behind us.”

“Well, changing weather means wind, and wind means surf.”

“Yup, a change is definitely due. The sea is never calm.”

“That it is not. Good night, Jason.”

He remained in the chair, slugging his drink as I went upstairs to my room. I needed to be sharp in the morning so got my belongings in order and set two alarms. It had been a good few days but the time had come to move on.

I've never been able to stand still while brushing my teeth, instead I pace about spattering minuscule droplets of toothpaste around my flat. That night my pacing drew me to the balcony where for once I did stay still, my left hand on the railing as I looked out over the gulf. There was a full moon in the clear sky and its light fell on the yachts below. Their rocking was almost imperceptible as the placid water lay at rest. I looked over to the hotel's small pier and saw Jason standing at the edge, glass in his hand, bottle at his feet.

Honduras was fun. The weather held out and the hostel I’d found had a good crowd. I would laze around in the morning, get some surfing in the afternoon then drink in the evening. Not a bad life. Of course, some days were worse than others, but not twenty-five million pounds worse.

One day a guy from Australia called Cale arrived, he was keen to surf and we got on well. It turned out we'd been following in each other's footsteps but until then had always been out of sync. Cale had arrived in Livingston the day I left but didn't stay at Hotel Solera. As we exchanged stories about the town he told me of a phenomenon I'd missed.

Four times a year, at the lunar perigee, the full moon coincides with its point closest to earth, causing a spring tide a few inches higher than usual. This had corresponded with the end of the dry season when the Rio Dulce is at its nadir. The result was the moon's gravity sucking the waters of the gulf upstream into the river, flooding it with salt water. This influx of salinity invaded the bodies of thousands of freshwater fish feeding at its mouth. Unable to fight the strength of the tide, the salt overpowered their natural osmoregulation and swift dehydration resulted in death. The ghost ships of their silent armada either floated upside down or were cast up on the shoreline. Among them, tangled up in the roots of the mangroves, lay the body of Jason MacIver.

The sea is never calm.