Author: Pete
Location: Navandra Island, Fiji
The airline industry must have figured out how to speed up time. Flights used to take forever to get anywhere! We drove four hours to Chicago, courtesy of Miranda’s momma, flew four hours to L.A., then eleven to Fiji arriving TWO DAYS LATER! Even with the time change, date change, pocket change for dinner in the airport, and a change of underwear for good practice, the trip was a breeze compared with the kind of travel to which we’ve become accustomed. I’m not sure about that International Date Line business either. I keep losing days off my life clock. Not cool. First August 6th, now September 15th! What’d you do on those days? I was in suspended animation! I told you the airline industry figured out how to do it!
A morning taxi ride after customs and we were ready to wake up the mighty Tayrona from her hibernation. You know those eye boogers you get when you sleep? Tayrona was encrusted with the boat equivalent of them. In humans that stuff is called gound, but on the boat it was a mixture of sugar-cane-factory soot and purple bird poop splatter. Gross. We washed her down, aired her out, and started installing all the new swag that we hoarded from Amazon while we were home! New hatch latches, new lift supports, new head diverter valves, new American flag, an empty box of Oreos…
It took us a couple days to get Tay-Tay back in fighting shape. We made a provisioning run into Lautoka, which aside from an awesome market, offers little to gush about. On the list of acquisitions was kava, the spindly root used by the island chiefs, among other things, in ceremonially welcoming visitors. Apparently in Fiji it’s common practice to bring a half-kilo of the stuff to each island or most certainly be eaten by the locals. The ladies in the market wrap the kava nicely in newspaper tied with string. Fancy.
The Vuda Point Marina itself is fairly isolated; on this side of the islands there are little more than cane fields busy turning sunshine into sugar. Sometimes I wish I could photosynthesize too. Around the marina grounds there are peculiar trenches, six feet deep, about shoulder width wide, and long enough for say five bodies to be nicely laid in there head to toe. This was a bit troubling on first sight until it became clear that they are keel pits for boat storage on the hard. Stored boats do better closer to the ground in hurricane winds, not up on rickety stands, so trenches are dug to accommodate the deep sailboat keels. Makes a lot more sense than mass graves, doesn’t it?
On the 19th we threw off our lines, eased Tayrona out of her snug berth, and motored out to sea. We sailed fifteen miles southwest to the tall island of Mololo and anchored in Musket Cove where one hundred boats bobbed, fresh from a recently finished regatta. That night the wind calmed and the anchorage was so flat that I woke thinking we had gone aground. The glassy water reflected the constellation of anchor lights in a perfect mirror and not a whisper of sound drifted across the harbor.
Ducking out early the next morning, we sailed north towards Navandra Island under steadily building wind and flat seas. The comfortable sailing conditions are due to the abundance of reefs in Fijian waters, making for exciting navigation. We are using a charting software new to us called OpenCPN which superimposes Google Earth images with navigational charts. You can often see uncharted bommies or boundaries of known reefs more clearly by the satellite images. It helped a lot in navigating with the diffuse light coming through the low, gray skies. The conditions were perfect for fishing and within an hour my new lure had picked up someone big. When the reel started buzzing we slowed the boat and started hauling. Eventually we landed a good sized Wahoo, welcoming him aboard with a shot of gin to the gills and the grand tour of our refrigerator.
We rounded the northern point of Navandra Island, actually three tall islets that form a cove protected from the southeast trade winds. The anchorage is deep, fringed with steeply-rising coral shelves all along the periphery. Happily, the anchorage was completely empty as we motored in. Fortune smiles! We set anchor in clear sand in thirteen meters of water and celebrated the solitude with a skinny dip and then some fresh sushi and sashimi! Wahoo!
Since then, it’s been a few days of enjoying the place and not rushing about like we’re used to. A few other boats have shown up, but there’s plenty of gorgeous snorkeling and island exploring to go around.
