Day 17 - Tuesday December 25, 2001 - 9:53pm

Christmas Day… in Fiji… or is it…? OK - I won’t go there again.

Christmas Day and the only thing that’s white around here are the ten — sorry, dix — French tourists who arrived yesterday. Believing they are in Tahiti (buy a fucking map!), they insist on speaking their langue maternelle apparently oblivious to the fact that no one else speaks or understands French. One of their ‘tribe’, a woman I believe (she had a little less facial hair so I’m assuming it was a female), is so disgusted with the way the drinks are being mixed that she commandeers one of the bars and insists on making drinks ‘the right way’. No wonder the Americans became so ‘buddy-buddy’ with the French during the battle for independence - they share the attitude. But who taught whom?

Later

The entire staff is wearing Santa hats and stringing Christmas balls and ornaments on every tree - fake and real. The requisite Johnny Mathis, Nat King Cole and Perry Como carols are being pumped out of the mini-stereo system at the bar. Thank God it’s a mini stereo system - it means I don’t have to run too far to escape its holiday drone.

Still Later

I’m spending so much time writing, now that I’ve found myself at Christmas I discover I have little to say. Still trying to shake this cold that wants to hang on - coughing and hacking mostly, a little bit of sniffles. Difficult to get rid of in a hot, moist climate. I’ll likely have to travel with this on Saturday.

Spent the better part of the day in the pool taking advantage of the giant sail for shade. And here I met the most interesting bunch of people from Sydney.

One gentleman, an elderly, gray-haired, somewhat wizened guy who gave me the impression he was the local ‘old fart’, gave me pause for the first half-hour or so while we were talking in the pool. He was clearly holding court, as they say, with a group of middle-aged corporate-types from Sydney and their grown kids. But it was the way he pushed around the staff, demanding this and that, and the way the staff sped around the bar and pool area catering to his every whim. It got me to thinking: Who is this guy? Can you say, OWNER?!

His name was Richard, Dick to his friends, one of whom I was quickly becoming. A glass of freshly presented chilled Champagne in hand I found myself toasting new acquaintances made, paradises lost and business plans laid. (I was actually hoping for paradises made, business plans lost and new acquaintances laid, but it was Christmas and once again the jolly red fat fucker hadn’t granted my wish!)

Apparently, Dick has been coming to Musket Cove since the mid-sixties with his family and now his children’s children come here every Christmas to celebrate the holidays in style. This was Dick’s 35th Christmas on Musket Cove.

After the second bottle of Veuve Clicquot had been opened and half drained, he started to tell me a story about Fiji and how Aussies — primarily Aussies, but Americans also — had moved in to Fiji early on, found their own little piece of paradise and decided to open a little business. He never looked much at me while he was spinning his yarn, but rather out toward the water break, just the other side of the cove.

“There was this guy,” he said, and he kinda went on from there.

This ‘guy’ helped build a resort in the mid-seventies and installed the first swimming pool anywhere in the islands shortly thereafter. Other resort owners thought he was crazy - Why a pool? There’s water all ‘round! Two years later every resort had a pool. Not to be outdone, Dick built the pool we were now sharing a few glasses of bubbly in only a few short months ago. It’s already the talk of the islands.

As a sidebar, almost as a compliment to the main event, so to speak, he spoke of another ‘guy’ from Sydney who made a sizable killing in the computer business when no one thought it a wise investment. I was especially happy to discover that this ‘other guy’ considered his shrewdest investment to be Apple stock, which he bought in 1986 after attending a conference at which Steve Jobs was speaking. Smart man, he thought then, and put his money where his mouth was. He bought 100,000 shares of Apple at US$6.50 a share… and held. And held. And held. All his cronies thought he was nuts over the next 15 years as Apple was continually rumoured to be, alternately, on the block, on the verge of bankruptcy, or out-and-out destitute.

When Apple stock went to US$110 a share and split two-for-one in February 2000 (on his birthday no less) he saw it as a good time to sell off half the stock. Made a cool US$5 Million profit! This short story was related, I’m certain, to underscore the fact that Aussies were just as smart as Americans - smarter, in fact. It occurred to me that he thought I was American and that was why I was imbibing expensive champagne and being regaled with the story in the first place. Far be it from me to interrupt the gloating… or the pouring!

Anyway, as the hooker once said after her coffee break, back to Dick.

He lives here with his wife practically year round, with a few side trips back to Oz and the odd excursion to Hawaii or Tahiti. He managed to answer the question I’ve always had of people who live in places like this:

When you live in a paradise in the middle of body temperature water, where on Earth do you go for a holiday…?

He laughed. “You don’t”, he said. Got it.

“Running a resort on this kind of scale is not for the faint of heart. I’m thirty-two years old - look at me!” he said laughing.

“You have to be an owner/manager. You can’t invest in a place like this and believe you can make it work on a time-share basis - doesn’t work. Look at the other resorts that are run by absentee owners from Australia, New Zealand, and America… simply doesn’t work. That’s why I’m not an investor - I bought, then I rebuilt, and now I renovate constantly.”

I asked him what his background was. What gave him the ‘chops’ to pull off a success like Musket Cove clearly is? “Marketing”, he said. No surprise there.

Aside from running this island business full time, he’s managed to get Fiji’s national airline, Air Pacific, to cross promote Musket Cove. With every inflight video there’s a short presentation on the island and the resort. The video is updated every six months to ensure currency; such is the level of upgrade that Dick insists on. Certainly storms and hurricanes (cyclones as they’re called here in the South Pacific) present a constant worry don’t they? He smiled. “Let me tell you a story”, he said. “There’s this guy…” Here we go again.

“He discovered something several years ago that most resort operators still haven’t managed to understand. When a cyclone comes it can and will wreak havoc with anything that stands in its way. The last major one caused over F$800,000 damage to Musket Cove alone - over a million to Castaway Island.” (I later discovered that Dick also built and managed Castaway as well before selling and taking on Musket Cove.) “There’s only one insurance underwriter stupid enough to handle cyclone insurance and their premiums went up more than 50% after that. They’re bastards! This meant that this guy’s resort had to pay F$400,000 a year just for that rider. That doesn’t include all the other aspects of the package policy, which together total nearly a million dollars a year. And that’s just for one resort! How would you like to try and make a successful business where every day of the year the insurance company gets the first F$1,000 of business just to pay for a premium against a storm that may never come?! I realize that’s the risk of insurance,” he said, “but this ‘guy’ discovered something in that equation that he turned to his advantage.”

It turned out this guy’s son was an MP in the Australian parliament. His main responsibility — part of his portfolio — is farms and ranches, a considerable responsibility in a country where most of the land mass is either farmed or ranched, and weather plays a huge role. His son told him that weather patterns have changed all over the world, some not so subtly - hello global warming. But none more so than in the southern hemisphere.

After the last big cyclone the people at the Aussie weather service charted the likelihood of a cyclone hitting the area (Fiji, Tonga, Marshall Islands, etc.) in the next ten years as part of a regional experiment. Not only was the likelihood less than 30%, but also apparently the weather migration patterns for the region had been plotted with a great degree of accuracy and the last two cyclones had been predicted with almost 100% accuracy! Because it was the Australian group that had made these findings there was no reason to share them with Fiji since to do so would have gone against a pact the country had with New Zealand. Apparently, NZ has been helping Fiji internally and externally with loans and other types of assistance for many years and they didn’t have access to the weather data. However, the guy’s son told him the results.

To make a long story short, this ‘guy’ decided that if he took a gamble and cancelled his cyclone insurance and then no cyclone occurred, he’d be almost half a million dollars to the good. The insurance company thought he was nuts. Of course, they were almost a half million dollars to the bad! The guy cancelled. No cyclone came.

Nor the next year, nor the next. Whoever this ‘guy’ was, he had now saved almost a million and a half dollars over three years and the insurance company was beginning to wonder when his luck would run out. It did, the next year. However….

It cost F$750,000 and three months to fix what had been destroyed. By saving almost two million dollars over four years and gambling on the cyclone, it had cost him only F$750,000 of that to make it right. He was still ahead.

There are two ironies to this story. (Others had joined us in the pool and we were all now several bottles of Champagne and more than a few chasers of chlorine-treated salt water into the afternoon.)

One, the Australian weather service had predicted this particular cyclone with such accuracy that the ‘guy’ was able to prepare for it as best he could, boarding-up some buildings and moving boats to shelter before it hit. This saved him almost F$200,000 in potential losses. Moored boats are not subject to a cyclone insurance rider - ‘Act of God’ apparently.

Two, when the insurance adjusters arrived on on the island to assess the damage and settle claims — third-party liability, water desalination plant coverage, that sort of thing — they found the ‘guy’ smiling and attending to the rebuilding at hand, being paid for out of his own pocket don’t forget. Quizzed by the adjusters, he bought them a drink and told them the story. In doing so, he believed that he would have the final laugh on a group of what he considered to be modern-day pirates.

The next day the adjusters took him aside, bought him a drink and told him that if he remained quiet and didn’t tell the other resort owners about the weather patterns — thereby assuring a steady annual stream of cyclone insurance premiums — they would reduce his premiums on the rest of his insurance policies! “Fuck off”, he apparently said.

“I believe this is when the term ’short and curlies’ was invented,” Dick said.

“Fair dinkum,” I said, and politely asked for another glass.