Scatter 44

Jon, at the desk at Karang Divers

I've been whiling away the days in Gili Air, while Jennifer attends to family matters back in the States, matters discussed in previous postings. Careful readers will recall that we visited Gili Air on our way to Bali, and made some friends at the local dive shop, as well as hung around the slightly refined Scallywags, an internet-friendly beachside restaurant on the east side of the tiny island. With three weeks to kill before Jennifer returned to Indonesia, and we resumed our voyage, and the choice lying between the noisy, dirty harbor in Bali or the friends and beaches of Gili Air, it was a no-brainer.

Getting here was more of a challenge than I expected; the currents that run southward between the island of Bali and the tiny, mid-channel island of Lembongan are extreme, and on the morning of my departure, I found myself with both engines running full ahead -- at RPMs that normally push me along at 7 knots -- and watching the chart plotter show my boat moving backwards at the speed of 1.5 knots! For the mathematically-challenged readers, this translates to a current of about 8.5 knots -- or roughly 9.3 miles per hour! It takes a long time to get somewhere when you're moving backward, so I hung a sharp right, headed south with the current, and slid across the current eastward toward the coast of Lembongan, where the current slowed to a mere 4 knots -- allowing me to head northeastward to the tiny harbor at the glacial pace of 3 knots ... arriving in late afternoon, having spent 10 hours traveling 20 miles at full engine speed. Without current, it's a 3 hour trip.

(Later, the very same currents would claim the life of a diver off Lembongan; here, currents don't just flow along the surface, they also move water up and down, as shoreside water is propelled to the 1000 foot depths of the mid channel, and then up again to the beaches of the adjoining shore. The diving tragedy began in Lembongan; the diver was apparently carried to 700 feet by the current, and the body washed up on the distant shore of Bali the next day. Even before the tragedy, the dive shops on Gili Air, one of which is owned by my friend Cedric and run by my friend Stannie, remain especially vigilant to currents, again reminded of the invisible power of the ocean. My prayers are with the diver and the family.)

Arriving at Gili Air, and re-introducing myself to Cedric and Stannie, I learned that their Gili Air dive shop was short of staff for a week or so -- Cedric had a three-day snorkeling trip to run for customers, Stannie was hosting a friend from Holland on Lembongan (she was there the day of the afore-mentioned accident), and others in the dive shop had diving commitments ... I offered to help, and just like that, gained another entry for my CV: interim manager of a dive shop. This is my story.

Cedric, Stannie, and Jon

The first thing I learned in running a dive shop in Indonesia is that the primary challenge is to make sure all of the necessary ingredients of a dive are present and accounted for at the time the clients show up. This is much easier said than done. That first day, I was brought back to my childhood, in the form of two overlapping memories.

In the first, I remembered one of my favorite records -- the Bill Cosby comedy album relating the story of playing football on the streets of Philadelphia: Arnie, go down, uh, 10 steps, and cut left behind the black Chevy. Philbert, you run down to my house, and wait in the living room. Cosby, you go down to Third Street, catch the J bus. Have him open the doors at 19th street. I'll fake it to you."

In the second, my Indonesian-born, European-raised father, who understood football but lacked any childhood muscle memories to throw a football any distance, would gather his six boys for a game of street football, and utter the deceptively-simple words "Scatter 44 " when describing the passing routes we were to run. In Glaudemans-speak, we knew what it meant: everyone was on their own, just run down the street, and somehow, someone would be thrown a wobbly pass.

On Gili Air, my new dive shop -- I was feeling immediately proprietary -- turns out to be a recent outgrowth of a much-more established shop on the neighboring Gili Trawangan (T), and as such, is dependent on the older shop's air compressor. Since full airtanks are a prerequisite for a safe dive, this means that any dives that use Gili Air as a launching point need tanks that are filled on the other island -- necessitating a constant shuttling of empty tanks to and full tanks from the mother shop.

We keep a modest base of dive equipment on Gili Air -- regulators, BCDs, wetsuits, fins, etc., but, as I was soon to learn, not everyone comes in the predicted sizes ... again requiring carefully planned requisitions from the mother shop for outsized fins, the odd BCD, etc. Further, certain dives could be chaperoned by a dive master; others required the services of a certified instructor, each of which paid on a commission basis, working freelance ... when they chose to work.

Finally, we need to make sure we have a boat, a captain and fuel for each dive trip ... with said boat, captain, and fuel based on yet another adjoining island -- Lombok. Three islands, tanks, fuel, instructors, divemasters, BCDs, fins, regulators, wetsuits, boat captains ... and matching these against our customers' vacation hours.

Each day, the various elements of the dive shop leave the shop, disappear around the island, wind up in someone's living room, or take the Third Street J bus and end up on 19th street. Once they returned in the afternoon, I would hear the moral equivalent of a Scatter 44 command, and everyone and everything would run out the door of the dive shop to God knows where to spend the night ... boats to Lombok, instructors to the bars on Gili Air, tanks back to Gili T for filling, etc..

Each night felt like the night before D-Day -- orchestrating the following day's boat movements, staff assignments, and equipment placements -- leave Lombok, pick up fuel in Mentigi, run to Gili T to pick up tanks, come to Gili Air for the client, make sure the instructor was here on time, trade a large BCD for a medium, drop off tanks at Gili T after the dive to be re-filled, refuel the boat, return to Gili Air for more customers, etc.

Add to the mix the fact that Ramadan had started, and that local employees were fasting during the day and eager to return to their families in the evening, and the commission-based payment structure for divemasters and instructors -- leading to them being less-than-enthusiastic at trips that involved just a few customers .... was a challenge to say the least.

By the third day, it became unsustainable; two of our divemasters were leaving that day for a 7-day diving trip to Komodo; one instructor continued to nurse a serious ear infection; a part-time helper was set to disappear to Java to continue her travels, and the mother shop needed all of our equipment to deal with their high-season demand. We had no flex on either equipment or staff.

Thus, at the suggestion of the owner, I closed the dive shop for a few days. The ultimate headfake. The ultimate Scatter 44. And the ultimate CV entry: "Interim Dive Shop Manager -- August 14-18, 2011. Responsible for overall operations; dynamic leadership resulted in having to close down the shop due to excessive managerial complexity and insufficient staff."

References available upon request.