After almost a decade, the girl who loved the ocean had forgotten what it was like.
Schapelle Corby stumbled across a Balinese beach and threw herself into the water, falling clumsily under the waves as they crashed around her.
It was a symbolic moment in the convicted drug smuggler's first days of freedom and a rare victory against the media circus that has camped outside the luxury villa where she has been bunkered for the past three weeks.
Corby's return to the ocean happened spontaneously in front of Ku De Ta, the popular Seminyak bar and restaurant which is a favourite with Australians, especially the media.
The 36-year-old - one of the most recognisable faces in Indonesia and Australia - snuck away from the photographers surrounding her Kuta hideout, had her first drink in a bar in nine years and then walked to the beach unnoticed by the crowd around her.
Two weeks earlier, as she was driven from Kerobokan prison, her covered face captured in images which went around the world, she told the bodyguard beside her that she felt like a crab, "trying to get out of a mud crab cage".
"I'm tired of people just... keeping me as a show pony," she said.
"I just started crying because I just feel so, I am just used, they just used me.
"People judge me and say I'm a really bad person, but look at this - this is just... that's wrong.
"There's a lot of people who are kind of against me getting out.“
Corby said she remembered the frenzy which surrounded her trial nine years ago. But she didn't remember the waves.
"She had forgotten how rough the surf could be," her sister, Mercedes, said last week of Schapelle's first moments back in the ocean.
"I think in her head she must have had clear water, enjoying slow breaststroke and instead she was tumbled over by waves."
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