DIVE LOG AUSTRALASIA ISSUE 413 AUGUST 25

You wouldn’t think it was possible, would you? Build a scuba diving resort at the edge of the world, in an area that very few people have heard of, where the nearest airport is hours away, where almost nobody has ever dived, where you have no contacts, there are no facilities of any sort and where you have to start from absolute zero. Could you do it? Would you even want to put yourself through the considerable effort of attempting it? But what if the diving was completely out of this world? Might that make it all worthwhile? Well, confronted by all of this, nevertheless, one person thought it would be worthwhile and believed she could do it. And that is how Triton Bay Divers came to be. It’s quite an inspirational tale. At the centre of it all is Leeza English, and isn’t that the essence of most pioneering stories? One key individual, one dreamer, one person who is sufficiently single-minded, fixated, and stubborn to keep their focus on the goal and to continue with an endeavour long past the point when most of us would give up. They can’t do it alone, of course, but they have a certain gravitational quality that draws people into their orbit. They are the sun around which others revolve. Born in England, raised in Hong Kong and blessed (or cursed) with itchy feet, in 2005 Leeza went to work in Miami. It was while scuba diving for fun in Florida that she had the seed of a thought that it might be nice to own a dive resort someday. So, the first step was to quit her job and go diving. Running low on funds, she did a divemaster course at Black Marlin resort in Sulawesi’s Togean Islands and began working there, which was when the seed began to germinate. Her next port of call was Bali to get qualified as a dive instructor, then she hit the road again, this time diving for work wherever her itchy feet took her, before returning to Indonesia to work as a cruise director on a liveaboard. Dive liveaboards are floating dive resorts, and they are the perfect medium for finding out if you have the necessary skills for resort management, such as people skills, hotel keeping skills and life-juggling skills. However, when you work in diving, particularly as a liveaboard cruise director, you don’t have the headspace to think much about the future. You are pretty much on stage and on duty all the time. And when you are off duty, you The Scuba Diving Trailblazing in the 21 st Century.Diving

sleep, watch movies, and try not to talk to anybody, let alone make long-term plans. Then an ear injury gave her some much-needed reflection time, and she began to look around Indonesia for a place which had great diving but that very few people knew about Then she came across Triton Bay, tucked away in southwest Indonesian Papua, and this seemed to tick all her boxes, so in May 2013, she went to visit. She quickly realised that she had found what she was looking for. There were challenges, but they could be managed later. This was the perfect opportunity. She and her business partner met with a West Papuan family who owned land in just the right place, close to the very best of the dive sites. It was in a secluded bay with a mountainside behind and jungle down to the waterline, and it faced the sunrise, which would mean beautiful mornings and cooler afternoons. There was also a source of fresh water. They incorporated the family into the business in a bid to help things go smoothly, and by September 2014, enough of the land was cleared for them to make a start. Leeza returned to Triton Bay on a ship with construction materials and where there were no resorts yet. This was a tough set of criteria to fulfil.

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DIVE LOG Australasia #413 - August‘ 25

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