Our walk with Tooey was on Tuesday. On Tuesday night, heavy rain began that continued through the next day. Local custom requires that you tell the chief in person when you are leaving the anchorage. It was raining really hard and we figured the chief would understand if we didn’t trek out in the rain to say goodbye.
We wanted to check out on Thursday morning, so the plan was Continue reading
Lat 17.20S, Long 177.08 E, In Fiji, once you get outside the cities, most of the land is owned by villages. A village not only owns the land, they also own the water around the land. In this culture, it is of utmost importance to obtain permission to be in their territory. It is considered very bad form to not ask permission to stay. There is a special ritual that is to be followed in order for permission to be granted. The importance of Continue reading
Shortly after waking up, we looked out and saw a big cruise ship had pulled in. They were shuttling people to the two islands in their tenders. Then we realized that there were more than a dozen people snorkeling behind Kosmos. Boy, we picked an interesting place to anchor!
We decided to go diving first, then to the island. We loaded into our gear and Continue reading
Thursday Yesterday was John’s last day before going back home. Like Adrienne’s flight a couple days before, he didn’t leave until 2230 (10:30 pm). Even though we had all day, we all decided to Continue reading
Eric navigated the pass into the lagoon this morning at 0400. It is a somewhat narrow pass and it was pitch black outside, so he couldn’t see anything other than a reef marker and two small flashing direction markers in the distance. If the direction lights are lined up from top to bottom, then you are supposed to be on course through the narrow channel through the coral. So it was a careful steering job to stay lined up in the moderate seas, which where swaying the boat a bit. Also the charts are not very high resolution, so the whole experience was a bit disconcerting for him. Thankfully radar, depth measurements, lights, and chart all lined up and everything went smoothly.
We pulled into Nadi this morning at 0630, ushered in by a lovely sunrise.
The mainland area looks like Southern California, with rolling, dry mountains. There is quite a bit of construction on the flat land along the shore and virtually no buildings along the mountains. There are several islands dotting the horizon all around the main land. We pulled up in front of the hotel that is the rendezvous point for meeting Christi’s dad, located on an island called Denaru. Like Coronado Island in San Diego, Denaru is right off the coast of Nadi and is connected by a bridge. Our plan was to anchor the boat and take a bus into Lautoka to notify the officials we had arrived. It seemed to us that there was no need to take Kosmos to Lautoka since we had already had an onboard inspection in Suva. Continue reading