Long before I was a parent, I was the fun, traveling aunt to my four nieces—the one who took them sledding down snowy screamers in Finland and snorkeling in Jamaica, letting them loose in ways their parents perhaps didn’t quite have the stomach for.

I was with my niece, Maddy, when she first snorkeled in the Florida Keys at the tender age of 4 (I can still hear her shrieking at the sight of schooling yellow and black sergeant majors, the first tropical fish she saw that weren’t in a tank). A few years later, she bravely joined me off Nassau to hover above more reef sharks than her years.

So, when I had the chance to bring Maddy, now 18, to Fiji to complete her PADI Advanced Open Water Diver course this past August, I leapt at the chance.

I first went to Fiji as a young backpacker back in 2000, sipping kava during homestays, chasing waves with my surfer boyfriend in Yanuca and diving the Astrolabe Reef off Kadavu Island. And while I’ve dived many dream-worthy places around the world since then, Fiji’s bold colors and abundant, swaying soft corals have never been bested.

At Paradise Taveuni resort, I watched Maddy greet her Fijian dive instructor for a shore dive I’d just completed on one of the most epic house reefs—all cascading hard corals with fingers unbroken, populated by eels, octopuses and lionfish—that drops to a depth of over 100 feet. I stayed back waiting for my niece to emerge from her first Fijian dive.

“I saw Nemo and ribbon eels,” she shrieked, that overjoyed 4-year-old resurfacing. There’s nothing like your first time in the Pacific. She completed her deep and drift dives on Taveuni’s astounding Rainbow Reef. During one epic half-moon foray along the Great White Wall, I followed behind her among vertical pastures of soft white coral and admired her on-point buoyancy in a swimthrough to a shallow reef where we lost ourselves in a stream of lyretail anthias and chromis.

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Days later, we moved across the Somosomo Strait to Fiji’s first PADI Eco Center, Sau Bay Resort & Spa, where we relived the trip’s diving highlights in our bungalow before falling asleep to the sound of rustling palms. There was the dive when humpback songs were the soundtrack, and we spent our surface interval watching them show off their flukes within spitting distance of our dive boat. One time, breathless from the beauty of another Rainbow Reef dive that glittered like a disco ball thanks to bazillions of damselfish, Moorish idols and fusiliers, we surfaced to a full rainbow arching overhead.

By the time we reluctantly packed our bags to leave, Maddy was more in love with diving than ever. Once again, I had the beautiful islands of Fiji to thank.