The more touristy Yasawa & Mamanuca Groups are home to the islands where the movie Castaway and the Survivor series were filmed. The Yasawa Flyer ferry makes them accessible from the international airport for a fairly reasonable price with almost daily trips. For this reason, it is a fairly good place for cruisers to host international visitors.

The navigation is still challenging with subsurface masses and reefs just below the water. I’m so grateful to have learned OpenCPN, because between that and our Navionics Boating app, we see most hazards. The screenshot below shows our path through the Yasawa Group, with waypoints in dark blue and hazards marked with red. The blue lines are the routes we planned, and the pink lines are the tracks from where we actually sailed. Routes are fairly short and easy to do in a day with a 9 AM start.

Malolo Island

We left Vuda Marina in the company of Sally & Rusty from Pitu. Malolo is home to the Musket Cove Resort, which in addition to accommodations on shore has a mooring field and a huge anchoring area that can accommodate over a hundred boats. A couple weeks after we visited, the Musket Cove Regatta had 120 boats participating. Too crowded for us. We anchored on the opposite side of the island and used our dinghy and kayaks for quick visits to the resort. We had a nice quiet anchorage with three boats, a beautiful coral reef, and our friends 🙂

Navadra

Our next stop was the unoccupied Navadra Island, where we could kayak and snorkel and Rusty could hunt (unsuccessfully) for lobster. We shared the anchorage with a couple of other sailboats and a one tour boat each night. Some of the tour boats feed sharks to bring them to the boats for tourists to view, so the sharks now think a boat engine is the dinner bell and rush to greet arriving vessels. Black tip sharks are fairly shy, but given that we arrived at dusk, we waited until the next day to swim so that they could clearly see and smell that we weren’t fish.

Naviti Island

Mountainous Naviti reminded us of the tall islands in the Marquesas. When we presented sevusevu to the chief, he offered to gather the villagers for a dance later that day, which we declined. As we came to the shore, women started heading towards the chief’s house to lay out their wares for sale, many of which were made in China. This happened on several of the islands we visited and felt too commercial/cheap. We bought some fruit and headed back to our boats after making arrangements to go for a hike with the chief’s grandson Ben the next day.

Our hike took us through the back of the village, where we passed their garbage burn pile and the pigsties. As we walked up the hill, Ben explained that the village children walked the path daily when school was in session. We paused several times to rest and he shared that as part of rugby training, they ran the trail five times, then tried to carry each other up the hill. Ugh.

The next day we moved our boats to a flatter part of the island and took a hike to see the wreckage of a WWII fighter plane. It turns out not much wreckage is visible even with a snorkel and we ended up not seeing it. It was still a nice walk.

Blue Lagoon

With strong winds predicted, we moved to a more sheltered location to hunker down in the Blue Lagoon outside a resort. We headed in a little late to take much advantage of the day use fee, except for the drink credit. After a nice performance by the resort employees, we headed to the Japanese restaurant for a ten piece small bites meal, which was delicious, but left Herman & Rusty still hungry.

We spent the next day rocking in the wind and waves on our respective boats, then went to Rusty & Sally’s for our goodbye dinner 😦

Waya Island

Herman and I headed back south, while Rusty & Sally headed east. For the first time since we arrived in Fiji, I put out a fishing pole and caught a beautiful Spanish Mackerel. After seeing my photo, my son Jefferson identified the fish and told me how to process it, which is not easy to do on a moving vessel. The fish bucket kept the fish until we arrived to the anchorage, and also serves for laundering clothes when cleaned up. It will be awhile before I qualify as a sushi chef, but it sure is nice to have six meals worth of fish in the freezer.

We presented kava to the chief, along with the fish head and skeleton which we’d been told the villages appreciated. We walked across the island to the nearby Octopus Resort along a paved path with pigsties nearby. A sow with her young piglets foraged, and we saw young weened piglets foraging on their own. We realized upon our return that our timing on low tide was wrong, which meant our dinghy was high and dry. We took that as a sign that we should return to the resort for lunch. The dinghy was still high on the beach when we returned, which gave us a chance to watch the beach.

The Octopus Resort the oldest dive resort in this area and we were amazed at the young families near the pool. Room rates run from a dorm room at $FD 59 (US$ 26) to a three bedroom bungalow for $FD 3,849 (US $1700), plus a meal plan at $FD 189 (US$ 85). Dives at the 40 nearby dive sites are extra. The information board for employees at the restaurant was interesting in that it contained server assignments, guest allergies, and a bible verse.

Upon our return, I took the kayak out but quickly realized that it was too windy and hurried to get back to Tieton. I felt somewhat wimpy when a teenage girl and her preteen brother came out in their sea kayak – of course without life preservers.

What’s Next

We returned to Vuda Marina to do our final provisioning and check out of Fiji so that we could head to Vanuatu. On one side, our neighbors were the marina employees working on a new dock.

The day before we left, I sent a message to the Vuda Marina WhatsApp group that we had two kava bundles to gift. We were happy to give them to Chris & Kay on SV Nanai, especially when we learned their story. They’ve been at the Vuda Marina for two years where they’ve helped to provide Fijian natives with the chance to get back on a sailboat, which many no longer have access to. They helped train the Fijian sailing team that went to the Olympics, and the one of the sailors they trained carried the torch in the Olympic’s opening ceremony in Paris. How’s that for impact!

After checking out of customs and immigration, and perhaps saying a final goodbye to Harold, our pet gecko we’d acquired along the way, we said goodbye to Fiji. The marina employees sent us on our way with beautiful flowers (so we’ll return to land) and their lovely harmonious singing.