Day 49, Year 2: How To Make A Calm Day Most Interesting
Date: Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Weather: Yet Another Picture Perfect South Pacific Day
Location: Korolevu Bay, Kadavu Island, Fiji

If you want to turn a nice, calm day into one with some very “interesting” adventures, come sail with Windbird. I don’t know how we manage, but somehow we have a knack of doing this. Today we managed to lose our way coming back from snorkeling and found ourselves totally surrounded by reef. Navigating a dinghy in reef country with no GPS is almost impossible. If the light is on the wrong side, you really can’t see the underwater reef until you are right on it. We carefully paddled our way out
of that predicament without damaging any coral. And then tonight we went to dinner at a resort. Should be a no brainer. But, we are in an area where low tide really means low–like no water at all in places. The resort sent a boat for us at 5:30, but they forgot to mention that we needed to come home by 8:00. At around 9:00, we mentioned that we were ready to go, but as our host Maggie said, we might leave in three minutes or three hours–it all depends. We thought he was joking, but we soon
learned that there was more truth in his comment than we had hoped. We waited until 10:30 and then with resort lanterns in hand, we walked across the mud flats for quite a distance and got into the boat. We left the lanterns with resort people who came out to push us into deeper water. These guys had all been drinking kava for the past five hours, but they got us out into about a foot of water. We then still had to be poled out to where the motor could be started. Paul and Marie of Ranger and
Colette and Jean-Pierre of Safina were with us, and not one of us had a light of any sort with us. And the resort boat had absolutely no lights either. There are only lanterns at the resort at night for light, so everyone there is used to no light. To say the least, the whole experience was . . . well, very interesting. We are home safe and sound and it was actually a wonderful day. We just had a couple of unexpected happenings that added a little spice to life.

The weather has been nothing less than spectacular the last couple of days and our snorkeling experiences today were phenonmenal. At 8 AM as promised, Skelly came by in his boat full of local men on their way out to the reef to fish. We told him we had decided to go to Lion Pool instead of following him, so off they went. At 9 AM, Paul and Marie of Ranger took off with us to see Lion Rock and snorkel in the Lion Pool. I had a hand drawn map to guide us through the reef area, but fortunately it
was low tide and we could see the coral. As you will learn later, the return home was not as easy. We worked our way through the coral and out to Lion Rock. It looks more like a lion the closer you get to it. I took a couple of pictures and then we headed out toward the reef as it was too deep to anchor the dinghy near the rock. We saw a turtle swimming under us as we headed out, and we could see lots of coral. We came to a sandy area and threw the anchor in. It hooked and we got into the
water to explore. There were lots of fish, but there was a lot of dead coral. We saw many Crown of Thorns that destroy the reef which was sad. Some of the dead-looking coral was starting to regenerate and overall it was a good snorkeling experience. We were all wearing dive skins, but after an hour in the water, it gets cold, so we headed back. This is when the fun started. It was no longer low tide and we could not tell where to go. We took our best guess at how to get to the pass, but we
actually ended up on the wrong side of an inner coral bed and we were surrounded. This is when we had to get out the paddles and work our way carefully out of the coral. Hitting just one coral can destroy a thousand years of growth, so we wove our way out very, very carefully. We were successful, and from where we were now located, the sun was at our backs so we could see clearly how to get to the pass. At least we thought we saw clearly. It was very deceptive and we had to move slowly, again
coming way to close to shallow water. But finally we made it out of the Lion Pool.

After leaving the Lion Pool, we made our way to Waya Island for more snorkeling. This is an island owned by an American who never comes here, but still it is private property and you can’t go ashore. So we anchored the dinghy and spent the next hour snorkeling over and around the most beautiful coral any of us had ever seen. I had hoped to write about all of the different fish, but it is late. I think I’ll use Jean-Pierre’s way of describing what we saw today–bright yellow fish, red fish, blue
fish, purple and orange fish, neon green cabbage coral with lots of bluegreen chromis swimming around it, pink anemones that looked like velvet blankets with turquoise and orange anemonefish, a baby and a very protective mother. You get the pictures. The colors were so beautiful and there were so many different varieties of fish. When we returned, Paul and Marie sat in the cockpit with us for over an hour looking at the reef fish books. We wanted to identify everything we saw, but that task couldn’t
be accomplished in an hour. We are going to delay our departure to the Lau Group for another day so we can enjoy snorkeling around Waya at least one more time. I’ll include the detail on the variety of fish in tomorrow’s log. For now I think I’ll turn in and hope to have dreams of colorful fish.

070612 Day 49 Kadavu Island, Fiji–Trip to Lion Rock

070612 Day 49 Kadavu Island, Fiji–Dinner at Matava