A flurry of crested terns and silver gulls flutter and dip above choppy seas just off Norman Beach, on Victoria’s Wilsons Promontory. It tells Robert Pennicott, who recently launched an amphibious boat cruise from this southernmost tip of mainland Australia, that there’s a school of baitfish just below the waves.

“It’s rare we wouldn’t have something underneath forcing them to the surface,” the owner of Pennicott Wilderness Journeys bellows from the wheel of the craft above a stiff wind.