This is a story about state-of-the-art ship building, recycling, aquaculture, government’s attempts to save a fragile ecology, and sustaining tourism: the last functioning economic flow in Indonesia. It started when I saw a curious dingy.

One morning as I walked around an empty beach on the island of Gili Tarawagan a mile or so off the coast of Lombok, I came across a very unusual boat. Lying against a thatched grass shack was a handmade boat constructed primarily of empty one-litre drinking water bottles. The small craft was made by strapping a hundred or so bottles together standing side-by-side. Along the necks and bases of the plastic bottles were two thin straps of bamboo, each attached by a web of green nylon cord. The boat was a classic triangular rowboat shape, about five feet long. I took a few photographs of this odd creation and continued walking.

Twenty meters further down there was another one, then another, and another. Each of the boats were slightly different. One was square, one was round, some had water bottle floors, some fish net, some bamboo. It’s an ingenious way to build a boat, extremely buoyant, though not very speedy-looking. Each one seemed to be handmade by a different individual, or someone who was trying various designs. The flotilla was lying along a row of beat-up huts right on the beach, but there were no people to be found.

Initially figuring that in Indonesia – wrecked by the current economic crisis –  were the only building materials the local fisherman could afford, I still wondered how they came to be. I asked my ever-helpful (for a price) bungalow manager about the boats. He would introduce me to the best boat builder, though he lived on another island. Instead, after a pony-cart ride through a mosquito-infested swamp, I was introduced to the builder’s eldest son, Mexs. J. Ruding: boat builder and seaweed farmer.

Mexs explained that about 12 months ago someone told his father that they had seen a boat made of water bottles, so he sat down and built one of his own. Now the boats are built by several islanders, and that they all check out each other’s designs and adapt new ones after trying them out. They use any material they can dig up and each boat takes about two days to build. They pay the local school children 1000 rupiah ($ .10 US) for each trash bag full of empty bottles they can collect around the island.

There are plenty to choose from. Everyone on the islands who can afford it, and pretty much throughout Indonesia, drinks bottled water, not trusting the local water supplies. Given a consumption of one to two litres a day, 200 million Indonesians, and tens of thousands of tourists, the number of empty water bottles is astounding. At every hotel and village I’ve visited there is a big pile of refuse lying about, usually full of clear, non biodegradeable drinking water bottles. In their very small way the boat builders of Lombok are starting a recycling revolution.

In addition to their boat building prowess, Mexs and his family are also the leading edge Aquaculturists on the islands. The water-bottle boat sare used to harvest seaweed, which is how Mex’s family earns a living. So the next morning I found myself waist-deep in the sea learning the theories of underwater farming.

Seaweed, it turns out, can be farmed just like corn and rice. My host explained the process. First the farmers stake rope into the ocean floorabout twenty meters offshore in neat rows parallel to the shore. At low tide in waist-deep water they individually tie baby seaweed plants to the ropes with string, each plant about eight inches apart. Then they wait 45 days.

During this period, the small buds grow into green clumps about ten inches long, shaped like tiny Christmas trees. The farmer then removes the plant and trims off the top two or three inches, which they retie to the anchored rope. The plant continues to regenerate itself through the next crop cycle where the process is repeated.

This is where the ingenuity of the boats comes in. Seaweed is heavy, and the water bottle boats are extremely buoyant, making them easy to float about while harvesting the plants. Each farmer has a boat attached by a rope their waist leaving both hands to cut and retie the plants, throwing the crop into the craft as they work. Before they started using the boats, two farmers would hang a net over a bamboo pole and carry it on their shoulders while they completed their tasks. Inventing the boats not only eased the effort needed to harvest the seaweed, but it allowed each farmer to work individually, doubling or tripling their output each day.

Once back on shore the seaweed is laid out in the sun to dry for three days and then packed into sacks for an outrigger boat trip to the mainland of Lombok. Eventually ending up in Jakarta, Mexs informed me that the end product is used in cosmetics manufacture, and as an ingredient in sunscreen. There is a cartel, coincidentally run my the elder Ruding, that pays 800 rupiah (about $.09 US) per kilo of seaweed. Monthly output on Gili Trawaganis about three tons. Mexs earns about the same farming as his previous job of SCUBA diving guide, but says he enjoys spending the day working with his family, all sixty of which now harvest seaweed. This is a nice change from some of the family’s previous occupations: dynamite fisherman.

An owner of the local dive shop told me how nice it was that the Indonesian government induced a number of the islanders to give up fish-bombing for farming. It’s easier to throw a grenade in the sea and collect the fish that float to the top after the explosion than to get them individually by hook, or intermittently by net. Lots of the local islanders had pickedup this easy skill, which unfortunately destroys what most of the tourists come to Gili Trawagan to see: coral. Aside from sunbathing, recreational SCUBA diving and snorkeling is the single largest draw for foreigners to the Gili Islands. Fish-bombing has damaged most of the coral beds surrounding the islands, and in an effort to stem this practice the government helped seed the seaweed farmers to give the fish-bombers another way to earn a living while maintaining the steady tourist flow and the non-stop emptying of dollars into the economy. The number of explosive fisherman is downfrom 200 to about 20 according to Mexs.

Now this might seem like a long story, starting as it did with an interesting boat, but it’s great to see how some local marine ingenuity is effecting the complex systems that keep life and commerce on these islands going.