Captain Unlikely

A glance at Martin Daly’s CV and you wouldn’t peg him as an eco-kind of bloke.

He plugged his first shark with a speargun aged fourteen, deckied on trawlers off Townsville, slit lambs’ throats as a farmhand in New Zealand, had a career as a diver and dive tech in the ARCO oilfields in the Java Sea through the ‘80s, before tucking under the wing of a 20th century pirate in Dave Barnett, who was never averse to blowing shit up underwater if it meant access to antiquities or precious metals.

Dave’s boat, Rader, (which Martin eventually bought and renamed Indies Trader) was an armour-plated pillaging machine. Even Martin’s first discovery voyage in the Mentawais in ’91 on Indies Trader was a salvage job, retrieving a sunken crane off Tuapajet at the north end of Sipura, using a dirty great barge and a 70-ton winch. Once the job was done – barge and crane dispatched to the mainland – they began sniffing for surf, (which wasn’t hard, as they could see Iceland breaking from the job site for starters).

MD’s been living in the whole burny burny fossil fuel marine ops world for half a century. He’s as much an engineer as an explorer; he collects boats like you and I collect boards; when he’s not skippering Indies Trader III on Indo or Pacific surf charters, he’s hosting well-to-do clients out in the remote Marshall Islands at his Beran Island Resort (a massive, elegant dwelling that looks like something out of a Tony Edwards’ Captain Goodvibes ’toon). MD neither looks, talks, or acts like your groovy eco-warrior, yet he and epic wife Lee are creating a model of sustainable self-reliance out there in the Western Pacific.

I spent November last year out at Beran Island, trying to finish Martin’s biography – a frustrating exercise ‘cos the silver-haired bastard keeps doing more stuff. Before we get any further here, let the record show that the Marshall Islands does have surf – often decent, occasionally phenomenal – but, jeez, I dunno, it’s not really a place you’d go to just for waves. For starters, reaching the Marshalls is a mission, and getting around isn’t easy. If all the Marshalls’ 1,225 islands were pieced together patchwork style, they’d form a mere 180 square km of land. As it is, they’re scattered over 1.2 million square km of raw ocean. 

If you’re into fishing and diving, kiting, foiling, and not seeing any other boats on the horizon, then the surfing’s almost a bonus. It’s a waterperson’s wonderland, one of the most pristine places on earth.

The Mentawais it ain’t, though. And that suits Daly just fine.

The big house

MD’S Captain Goodvibe's house took three years to build over the late noughties / early twenty-tens. His plucky little Indies Trader made at least twenty trips to and from Majuro (the Marshalls Capital), loaded up with thirty tons of blocks and bags of concrete in the hold each time. With no pumps, the concrete was poured in buckets. The slab pour alone took forty hours, non-stop.

It’s all a bit surreal when you bowl up at Beran for the first time. Firstly, there’s the indigo depths right by the wharf, where sharks cruise by below in water so clear it’s like they’re suspended in air; then there’s the island itself, the foreshore, the palms, the pandanus that tower twice the height of their Australian counterparts, and the venerable old hardwood trees. An electric cart takes you past the board shack, where all manner of surf, paddle, kite and foil boards await their owners’ return, along the neat little road that runs up the island’s centre, which terminates a minute later at the house. It’s immense, and so well finished and furnished that three years feels like a quick build. 

600 tonnes of concrete on a small tropical island. It’s a helluva footprint. MD was conscious of it from the start.

“The privilege of building out here, on something so beautiful, came as a massive responsibility. As far as energy goes, the idea of running generators 24 7 had no appeal whatsoever. So we did a deep dive into the options.”

The result of that dive is an impressive, ever-improving, off-grid power system. 

Long story short, Beran requires a constant load of four kilowatts in caretaker mode, and about ten when the house is fully occupied by a dozen guests. It’s powered by a hundred 280-watt solar panels on the roof, feeding into a bank of batteries capable of storing 110 kilowatt hours. There are also two 10-kilowatt wind generators on the weather side of the island – impressive turbines that harvest the tradewinds, providing shore power to the boats on the wharf, and feeding the house through the night as the solar panels take a breather.

Those spinning props, though. Won’t somebody think of the birds? As I put this to Daly, he jumps on the chance to distance himself from any holier-than-thou eco posturing. “When people on social media learnt we were putting turbines up on the island, they were saying we were going to decimate the bird population, so we put an old barbecue under one of the turbines just to put the shits up ‘em.” (Over my month on the island, not a single feather of the thriving noddy, tern, or heron population was ruffled, and the infamous BBQ has never been used for the purpose of cooking ‘em up.)

If talk of kilowatt hours makes your head spin like the aforementioned turbine, here’s a simple way to understand the effectiveness of these renewable power sources: there can be up to eight aircon units running simultaneously in the bedrooms, there’s commercial fridges, four chest freezers, two ice makers, lights, fans, screens, devices in constant need of charging, and a workshop in the house’s cavernous bowels. All this is catered to by the sun and wind. The standby generator only ever gets a guernsey when there’s an extended spell of no wind and no sun, which isn’t often in these parts. 

Some back-of-the-napkin numbers: to run Beran on generators would burn through 120K AUD of diesel a year, 1.5 million bucks a decade if you factor the cost of running all those drums out to the island. With turbines, solar and batteries in place, the diesel bill’s less than a tenth of that. 

I have only a vague understanding of such matters at best, but seeing a place so scaled-up-large and comfy, powered so effectively by these sources feels incredibly heartening. 

Island overview: circles indicate turbine locations

All the water’s collected from roof gutters – there’s not a plastic water bottle in sight, THANK SWEET BABY JESUS – and an ever-expanding veggie garden supplies all the greens and most of the vegetables. (The garden copped a heartbreaking hit in 2018 when a massive swell and tide washed through, wrecking the beds and salting the soil, but with patience and care, it was productive again by late 2020.) 

As you’d imagine, there’s no shortage of fish around. The 'Wahoo Tree' – a certain patch of strait between Beran and another island – reliably provides protein whenever needed. It was interesting to see, as November unfolded, how a subtle dip in water temperature brought the pelagics, quite literally, to the table. 

For all the feel-good wins, though, there’s no getting around the fact that anywhere modern humans dwell, there’s gonna be waste.

“All the rubbish gets sorted: Food, paper, glass, plastic, aluminium. Nothing’s thrown out. But it’s a battle with all these islands. What do you do with the rubbish? We bring in boatloads of stuff, and we consume the contents. My policy is if we can bring it in by boat, we can send it back out the way it came in. And that's what we do. 

“We separate all the rubbish, bag it up and take it to the dump in Majuro. It doesn't solve it, but at least it keeps it out of here. The locals think we're nuts, like, “Why would you spend money to do that?” 

“There’s a dark side to some of the resorts in the Mentawais. If you look around and find the dump out the back, there’s some poor practices going on. We’re definitely not perfect, but it’s a guiltless rubbish protocol because we’re diligent as we can be.” 

And with Starlink now providing guests with as much bandwidth as they can hope to stream. Another big piece of modern living’s puzzle has been resolved. 

“We can feed ourselves, we can entertain ourselves. We've got surfing, diving and fishing and everything here. It's getting to the point, why would we want to leave here? Why would we want to go anywhere else for crowded surf and traffic, police and parking?”

While we're talking all things good and noble on the eco front, we should probably mention the time Martin got drunk and shot his mouth off in Majuro.

Since his first visit to the Marshalls in 2006, Martin had met and become mates with a number of Marshallese dignitaries, not least a fella named Tony de Brum. Tony’s a giant of Marshallese history: he’d served as Foreign Minister, Minister for Environment, Presidential Candidate and Kwajalein Senator. As a nine-year-old, Tony witnessed the Bikini Atoll Castle Bravo detonation from his old boy’s fishing boat in the Likiep Atoll. Fifty years later he took Nuclear Nations to court in the Hague (earning a Nobel Peace Prize nomination). Tony steered The Marshalls to independence in 1986, and his biggest achievement as a statesman was bending the 2015 Paris climate negotiations to the good of all vulnerable Pacific Island nations. Tony made shit happen.

Some details of house and power storage

As the Beran build took shape in the late noughties, Martin would regularly pass through Majuro, often dropping by Tony’s house – always bustling with officials and elders – with a bottle or three of good Australian wine tucked under arm. On one occasion in early 2011, after downing a few reds with the assembled decision makers, Martin – who might have had a head start on the vino on the flight from Hawaii – began offering opinions beyond his station. 

I said, “What do you guys get out of all this shark finning? Do you realize two 20-foot containers leave here every month, bound for Asia, completely full of shark fin? No-one here’s getting anything out of it, except for corrupt officials, but you're killing all the sharks.” 

“Why don't you turn the whole country into a shark sanctuary? Get some good news coming out of the Marshall Islands that costs you nothing? Next thing you know you'll have Nat Geo, BBC, CNN all calling up saying good on you for keeping the ecosystem alive. You’ll make more from tourism, because right now it’s not a good look to see dead sharks washing up on your beaches. And when people try to keep shark finning – and they will – you’ll make money on penalties.”

Martin didn’t expect his rant to go anywhere, he was just showing off after a few red wines, but Tony saw the merit and went on to table a bill before parliament. And though a number of politicians were on the take from the finners, to vote against the act would be to expose them as corrupt, so it was voted in unanimously, and by late September 2011, over 1.2 million square miles of ocean surrounding the Marshalls (an area four times the size of California) was off limits to commercial shark fishing.

Tony de Brum’s resolve, and the RMI’s patrol boats proved an effective deterrent, slamming the brakes on shark finning operations, while bringing in revenue from the apprehended poachers. The illegals didn’t give up easily, and pushed their operations to the edges of the sanctuary, where patrols were few and far between. 

In a sobering turn of events, as part of their famous 'Shark Week' programming, Discovery Channel documented a research program up in Bikini Atoll, studying the movements of the sharks whose forbears were killed en masse by nuclear testing in the ’50s. Seventeen sharks were tagged and tracked, and Martin’s vessel, Indies Surveyor, was engaged as support ship for the 'Nuclear Sharks' doco crew as they followed the pings from the sharks whenever they neared the surface.

The erratic, zig zag course that half the sharks took made no sense until it dawned on researchers that the sharks had been caught and lay dead among thousands of others on illegal fishing vessels. 

Patrol boats closed in on the signals from the tags, but corruption runs deep, and the moment authorities came within UHF radio range of the poachers, the pings all stopped at once. Sharks and tags dumped overboard after a tip-off. 

Despite the gruesome trade finding ways to operate in the shadows, the sanctuary has been massively beneficial to the people of the Marshall Islands and their beautiful, toothy, essential sharks.

Sasha with Mahi, Laura with Wahoo. Veggie and coral gardens.

I have to admit I spent more time at the desk during my time on Beran than I should've: choosing the keyboard over fishing and surf expeditions a dozen times at least. But I’d be sure to get in the water every day. I’d head downstairs from Martin and Lee’s big breeze-filled house, past the shed where the batteries banked the sun, walk between the network of raised veggie beds, pick my way over the coral, onto the sand. Sometimes I’d walk into the mirror lagoon and just stand there. 

Baby black tip sharks, a foot or two long, would reliably swim by. If you were in their path, they’d see you at the last moment, freak out and do a hasty U-turn. But they have less to fear from humans round these parts now, thanks to a certain pissed-up bloke speaking out of turn back in 2011.

// GRA MURDOCH