By accident.

Justin Werner — Werns to anyone who has been on a boat with him — built Nickel Industries from scratch. He arrived in Indonesia in 2008, found a high-grade laterite deposit on the coast, drilled it, permitted it, mined it, and went on from there. Today the company is ASX-listed, a top-ten global producer of nickel, and a strategic supplier of class-one nickel matte and mixed hydroxide precipitate into the electric vehicle battery supply chain. He has been in Indonesia ever since; his wife is the actress Indah Kalalo. That is the day job, or was. Hospitality is the second act.

The second act began, as these things do, by accident.

I. The bar at Komune

Werns was a guest at Hotel Komune Bali, walking through the property on his way to the toilet. He passed a man at the bar he half-recognised. They had never met. Each had known of the other for years — same circles, mutual friends, parallel lives in Indonesia — without ever quite landing in the same room. The man at the bar was Tony Cannon, who built the resort.

Two hours and a few Tommy's margaritas later, the two had a plan. Werns owned MV Samkara, a twenty-four-metre Ferretti based out of Benoa Harbour and operated through The Yacht Club Indonesia. The plan was simple. Werns would bring Samkara up the east coast to Keramas. The two families — wives, kids, nannies, grandparents, ten heads in total — would paddle out and meet her offshore. They would go and have a look at the islands.

The adventure started in the way Komune adventures usually start, with the big yellow surf-rescue mal. Tony paddled each guest out, one at a time, from the beach at Keramas to the Samkara at anchor a few hundred metres offshore. The esky came too, stocked by the Komune bar team and floated out separately. Ten guests, four cabins, eighteen knots of cruising speed, a teppanyaki grill on the upper deck, and a destination.

II. The cliffs of Penida

From Keramas they ran south-east across the Badung Strait to Nusa Penida and tracked the western coast. This is the wall of cliffs that has launched ten thousand Instagram accounts — Kelingking, the T-Rex headland, the most photographed limestone in Indonesia; Broken Beach, the collapsed sea cave that opens through a natural arch into a circular lagoon; Angel's Billabong, the rock-cut infinity pool that has drowned more than one tourist who didn't read the swell. From the water they look different than they do from the cliff path. They look bigger, quieter, and harder to reach.

Samkara dropped anchor off Manta Point and the families went over the side with snorkels. The mantas were there, as they almost always are — three-metre wingspans, slow, indifferent, gliding past the cliff wall in formation while ten people held their breath above them.

III. Ceningan

By late afternoon they were across the strait at Nusa Ceningan. Ceningan is the third of the Nusa islands, smaller than Lembongan, almost unknown next to Penida. No cars are permitted; only scooters, bicycles, and the occasional tuk tuk. The party went ashore, hired a couple of the tuk tuks, and rode to Suku Beach Club on the western cliff. Suku looks straight down on the Mahana Point left-hander; in the right swell, head-high waves peel along the headland with a handful of surfers gliding across each set. They drank champagne and watched the surfing for an hour.

IV. The strait, the Gilis

Back on the Samkara, Werns lit the teppanyaki. Wagyu, prawns, reef fish, vegetables; the boat ran a slow lap of the strait between Lembongan and Penida as the sun went down behind Mount Agung. They found a sheltered anchorage on the Lembongan side, ate, and slept.

Day two was the Gilis. Samkara crossed the Lombok Strait at first light and the families spent the day moving between Gili Air, Gili Meno and Gili Trawangan — three islands, three temperaments, no motor vehicles on any of them. They stayed the night at BASK Gili Meno and ate there, then took the short hop across to Trawangan for a long evening of the kind one has on Trawangan.

Day three was the run home to Benoa. Twenty minutes by car from Benoa back to Komune.

It was, for Tony, a small revelation. He has lived in Bali for the better part of two decades and built a resort an hour up the coast from the airport, and the southern half of the island is a traffic problem that gets worse every year. The yacht solved the traffic problem. The archipelago — Penida, Ceningan, Lembongan, the Gilis — was right there, all of it, and now reachable without ever sitting on the Sunset Road in a car.

V. Further west

Werns and Tony have been on a lot of boats together since. Samkara has been joined in the fleet by a one-hundred-foot Azimut and a thirty-five-foot tender. They have worked their way further west — Panaitan Island, off the south-western tip of Java, the legendary One Palm Point left-hander inside Ujung Kulon National Park, where the only neighbours are forest rangers, wild deer, and the occasional dolphin pod; and Krakatoa itself, the volcano in the Sunda Strait that took the top off itself in 1883 and is still rebuilding.

The first picture above is the crater rim of Anak Krakatau — the child of Krakatoa — with the Sunda Strait open behind. The second was taken at a beach bar somewhere on the chain. The hats vary; the company does not.

What started as a misdirected walk to a toilet has become, in its quiet way, a small fleet, a friendship, and an itinerary the families now plan the year around. There is a lesson in there about how the best parts of a life in Indonesia tend to begin — accidentally, in a bar, with someone you almost knew already — but it is a lesson that resists being written down. The boat leaves Benoa at first light most weekends in season. There are still cabins.