Ann Shaw has the sparkle of a teenager in her voice as she remembers the first time she set eyes on her adventurer husband Dave, who died four months ago in one of the deepest underground caves in the world.
'We met at a camp at the Baptist youth group in Perth one Easter,' said Mrs Shaw, deputy principal at Hong Kong's German-Swiss International School, after her return from a nine-day visit to the scene of her husband's death in South Africa.
'I was with a group of other people when Dave came up and sat down - and that was it. I just couldn't stop looking at him and he was the same. It was love at first sight, although I was too young to know what was happening. I was 17 and he was 18.'
The two youngsters could hardly have been any more different; Ann was the studious daughter of a Baptist minister; Dave was a buccaneering young pilot flying crop-spraying planes over the plains of Western Australia.
'Our first date was in an airplane and I was scared stiff,' she said. 'I knew when I first met him that he and I were very, very different people. I guess it was part of the attraction. He gave me the freedom to do what I wanted to do. He always encouraged me.
'I had done very well academically and he never saw that as a threat. He was the only boy I knew at the time who wasn't threatened by it. He just saw that as something special while most boys I knew would comment on it in a negative way.'