When the noise of the anchor chain had died away, and the 40 metre live-aboard yacht NAI'A was safely anchored in the lagoon at Wakaya, I went in search of the owner/manager, Rob Barrel. 'Er, Rob, don't you think that maybe a tuna head is essential dive equipment at a site like this?' So we took one out of the fridge for the pre-breakfast dive.
I placed the tuna head on a ledge at 32 metres. Off in the blue, Cyphaea jellyfish passed sedately in the current like orbiting satellites. Grey reef sharks came in, fast and bold, not used to being fed here. Freelance writer Cathie Holloway, suspended in the blue somewhere on her own, was circled by six greys and bumped by one and then there was that strange shark above, a shy scalloped hammerhead weaving through the blue. A big manta came along the cliff through the distorting thermocline. I held my breath and it swept past a couple of metres away. Another pair passed overhead.
During the night, NAI'A had motored the 70 nautical miles to Wakaya from our first destination, Beqa Lagoon. Beqa (pronounced Benga) is famous for its soft corals and fire walkers. These were undemanding dives to get those of us who hadn't dived for months into the swing of things. The currents and nutrient-rich lagoon account for the masses of filter feeding invertebrates at Beqa. We dived Three Nuns and Two Monks. Both are heavily colonised with soft corals, sea whips and sea fans. At Two Monks there was a tunnel so full of soft corals and gorgonians that it was difficult to find anywhere to place a knee or elbow. Photographically it was the best part of the dive, and afterwards I wished I'd spent all my time there. A long-nosed hawkfish led me round and round a sea fan, the red filigree on its flanks mimicking the sea fan abstracts. There were catkin-like zappy coloured Echinigorgia gorgonians which the Fuji people might have had in mind when they invented Velvia.
February, when I was on NAI'A, is not the best time for good visibility. This is the height of cyclone season, the water is a warm 28°C, and the plankton is blooming. The visibility can be as low as 25 metres. Although the summer is cyclone season, the chances of one affecting your trip are very small. This season there have not been any, and if there is a cyclone (same as a hurricane) you don't need to be far from the centre to have only moderate winds. What I love about the summer is the weak tradewinds, often ten to 15 knots. In winter, when the water is down to 26°C and the visibility better, the trade can blow at 20 knots for days on end, which can be tiresome. But for photography, I'd vote for winter when the sky is less likely to be overcast.
From Beqa we motored overnight to Wakaya, one of the biggest privately owned islands in Fiji. There are eight luxurious houses owned by the rich and famous, and an exclusive resort, frequently rated one of the top five in the world. Wakaya is famous for hammerheads. On one occasion, one of NAI'A's dive guides saw 17 of these sharks in the pass. I hoped that the tuna head might attract a hammerhead, but they tend to be shy. With the promise of hammerheads I cannot go in the water with a macro lens, so I didn't look for the leaf scorpionfish, blue ribbon eels (the juvenile of which is utterly black), elegant dartfish and the decorated dartfish. The dark green coral Tubastraea micrantha with its associated gobies is plentiful here and is one obvious difference to Tongan reefs where it is rare. Two large bommies lie in the entrance to the pass. On top of one there are lionfish which will come out and feed in the current. North of the pass on the shallow reef top is a manta cleaning station. The mantas have many shark bites out of their trailing edges. Along the dropoff are walls covered with yellow and white soft corals, much like the famous Great White Wall on Vanua Levu.
Late that afternoon after three dives, with a hammerhead on each, we motored across to the old capital Levuka, on the island of Ovalau. We sat in the old Ovalau Club drinking beer, the sunset trying ever more surreal filters on the sky, amidst desultory chatter and a decor seemingly unchanged since the old sandalwood and whaling days when the high whaling days when the high street had 131 bars and one church. But the sandalwood and most of the whales have gone, and of these venerable institutions only the church remains - which says something about the staunch Methodist attitude to fun in Fiji. Some Methodists in Fiji make Atilla the Hun seem like a Rotary club member.
After dinner, NAI'A slipped quietly out of the pass bound for E-6, a spectacular seamount in the deepest and narrowest part of Bligh Water. The drop-off is severe, vertical to 700 metres, and there is nowhere to anchor. Only the wind holds NAI'A off the shallow reef. The Cathedral is the best site at E-6, and perhaps the prettiest we saw. The deep circular gully is carpeted with soft corals, and sea fans and sea whips adorn the sides. Shafts of light spear down as though from high church windows through still air hazed with incense. This is fish-eye lens country, but macro subjects abound, like the strange Glaucid nudibranchs and the scarlet gobies on the sea fans. At night, lobsters and squid and Anomalops flashlight fish appeared. We found tiny cowries on the soft corals and red spider crabs on the fans.
Nearby is Mount Mutiny, so called because NAI'A once stopped there for a single dive. The guests returned with other ideas and persuaded Rob to stay. Bligh Water is named after Captain Bligh who sailed his small open boat through here in 1789 after being cast adrift by the Bounty mutineers. Again, the dropoff is severe and our first dive was deep to see vertical fields of Siphonogorgia soft corals. Barracuda and dog-tooth tuna appeared, distant and insubstantial, and then were gone.
We motored overnight to the island of Gau, anchoring in the mirror of lagoon in the dawn twilight cast by the shadow of the folded green to the east. I found Rob Barrel on the foredeck admiring the view. I asked him about NAI'A - I was curious about how someone so young ends up with a 40 metre live-aboard. Rob used to skipper private sailing yachts for wealthy owners. He wanted to apply the techniques of human anthropology to the study of dolphins and thought that maybe you could support this research with chartering. Although NAI'A was built in 1979 to a design by mega-yacht designer W. de Vries Lentsch, when Rob found her in the Caribbean she was almost derelict. A $1.5 million refit, adding a wing mast and sailing rig, created a luxury dive charter yacht. Rob assumes the guests know what they are doing; such mature dive protocol benefits everyone and makes Nai 'a attractive to photographers. Computers are advised, and are available for hire. If you want to dive alone at night that's not a problem ... but you have to come back.
NAI'A accommodates 18 guests in nine air-conditioned state- rooms. The air-conditioning cools the air without reducing your mucous membranes to sandpaper. The spacious photography room has multiple shelves and plenty of 110V and 240V outlets for charging batteries and two big soaking tanks for camera gear. There's enough room to spread out and be untidy. At night, either the photography room or the foredeck is the venue for a kava drinking and music session led by the crew.
Aft of the camera room is the dive deck. You don't carry tanks anywhere, you leave them empty and they reappear full in the right boat with your regulator on. NAI'A carries two 5.8 metre Naiad (no relation) RIBs with aluminum hulls and 70HP outboards. They are fast and excellent. Two are always used, so while one is always on standby near the divers, the other can ferry you back to NAI'A. There are hot deck showers for an after-dive rinse, with fresh hot towels. (The water, remember, was 28°C.) I had no idea that diving could be so decadent! Between the dive deck and galley is the light airy saloon. The food and service are simply outstanding.
The saloon has a library of serious titles - Alien Sex is the only one I noticed - and a multimedia centre with Hi8 and VHS in PAL or NTSC, a light box and a projector. This is where you can watch staggeringly boring unedited video from the last dive, zooming all over the place and the camera hosepiping everywhere. (Unless Rob shot it, in which case you expect to hear Attenborough narration chipping in.) Rental still and video gear is available, plus Hi8 editing facilities and E-6 processing. If you like music, bring your own CDs - the other guests may have different tastes.
At the north Gau Pass live-aboard dive boats used to take divers outside the pass until one day photographer Jim Church wanted to dive a series of coral heads inside the lagoon on the way to the pass. Now Rob takes the divers to Jim's Alley because it's so much better than the outside. At the bases it is relatively barren, but the tops are a kaleidoscope of colour and movement. Tomato red Heteractis magnifica anemones with their associated clownfish are almost overgrown by masses of coral. Above, clouds of fairy basslets - including Pseudanthia dispar - feed on plankton passing
Left: the 40m luxury live-aboard dive vessel NAI'A, designed by William De Vries Lentsch and built in Holland. in the current. Hiding in a cave was a sweetlips, which must have known I had the fish-eye on and obligingly came up to the dome. On NAI'A's next trip the divers had fifteen mantas pass them at this site. Is there no justice?
Rob keeps all dive site data on computer so he can quickly check at what state of tide the visibility is best, or the soft corals expanded or what animals are likely to be seen. At Nigali (pronounced Ningalis) Passage this kind of information is vital; the clear ocean water flows in the pass on the ebb while most of the lagoon is emptying through the northern passes. Our first dive at Nigali Passage was mid- afternoon, shortly after hors d'oeuvres in the form of sashimi had appeared in the saloon. There was some left over so I stuffed a few cubes into my wetsuit on my way to the inflatables. We dropped in at the seaward end of the pass to be greeted by a huge school of barracuda just hanging in the current. By grovelling across the sand I was able to approach without disturbing them. There's something magnificent about wall-to-wall barracuda at close range, a kind of magisterial indifference. Big-eye jacks poured through the pass towards the ocean, in a hurry but still curious enough to cascade towards me. Sharks and snappers are not fussy; they like sashimi even without wasabi sauce. What impressed me was the excitement a few cubes of tuna generated in all three species; snappers, sharks, me.
The snappers soon demolished the tuna and the current blasted us up from 30 metres into a shallow sandy area carpeted with garden eels. At the lagoon end of the pass is a lovely area of the cabbage coral Turbinaria reniformis with soldier fish interleaved between the convoluted plates. Rob suggested a shark feed the following day. Organisation in the stiff current was tricky; eventually we all assembled in the right place and the six tuna head wired together were brought down and tied to the reef. There was initial chaos as snappers, sharks and yours truly got mixed up together, but as usual, they behaved impeccably. Everything you read about sharks says they are unpredictable. Let me stick my neck out - unpredictability is just a measure of ignorance. I think greys are more predictable than dogs and I can't think of one occasion, (OK one - when I was chased out of the water) when the behaviour of greys surprised me.
They fed in cycles, the sharks scaring away the red snappers, which returned immediately once the sharks had lost interest. A green moray and several large groupers joined the fray. The greys here are almost all females. Sometimes hammerheads are seen in the pass, but are shy and stay at the edge of any disturbance. Once Rob saw a guitar shark, which is rare as far east as Fiji. (Kim Westerskov saw a sailfish in the pass!) The shark feed precipitated long discussions on the upper deck beneath the stars about the ethics of feeding sharks. Rob was initially reluctant, but acquiesced to demand and now is keen because, frankly, it's great fun. But there is no hand-feeding showmanship making the sharks into circus animals. It is fascinating and no more dangerous than getting in a taxi in Fiji. And with 100 million sharks being slaughtered each year, worrying about the ethics of feeding some seems pointless. If the photographs produced while feeding saves a few sharks through greater awareness, then feeding is worthwhile.
That night we visited Sawaieke village to make a formal presentation - or sevusevu - of kava to the chief. The village put on a meke (a bash) for us with incredibly tame dancing, but some of the young Fijian girls were compensation enough for male eyes weary of endless horizons. The kava ceremony is central to Fijian culture. The bilo of kava is presented to you, you make one hollow clap and drain the polished half-coconut shell and clap three more times. Do not think of old washing-up water at this stage, or wonder about the personal hygiene of the guy that sloshed the powdered root of Piper methysticum around the tanoa or wooden bowl in a home-made teabag device - basically an old hanky. Initiates sometimes say 'maca' (pronounced matha) after draining the bilo, which means 'empty', but might just as well mean 'I will not get hepatitisk I try to stick to Fiji Bitter, but protocol is protocol.
Fiji has preserved quite a bit of culture and the people are only slowly having their happiness eroded by awful 20th century inventions such as videos, jobs and Shortland Street. To get an overview of Fiji's best diving, which is spread out over a huge area, you either need to stay at several different resorts, or take a trip on NAI'A. As a dive destination Fiji is far enough west to have high species diversity with consistently great diving but without pests like malaria, box jellyfish or Australians. Maybe that's why Fijians never seem to worry about anything. The NAI'A experience is life being Fijian for a while; your dive computer does the worrying about nitrogen and the dozen crew attend to everything else. Of course if you are a photographer too, then there are plenty of things to worry about: like when can I arrange my next NAI'A trip?
Fiji & NAI'A
Fiji is an archipelago of more than 300 islands with a land area of 18,272 square kilometres spread over 200,000 square kilometres of the South Pacific. Fiji is a three hour flight from Auckland, five from Hawaii. A visa is not required in advance. Although English is the official language, Fijian and Hindustani are widely spoken. The spelling is confusing because of the system of orthography invented by the early missionaries. Nautical charts use phonetic spelling. Currency is Fijian dollars, approximately two to the pound sterling. Maximum daily temperatures are approximately 3 1°C in winter (May to October), 33°C in summer (November to April). Water temperatures 28°-29° in summer, 26° in winter. A 4mm one-piece wetsuit is ideal. For more information contact the Fiji Visitors Bureau, Thomson Street, PO Box 92, Suva, Fiji. Ph +679-302 433, fax +679-300 970.
NAI'A Cruises, PO Box 3179, Lami Fiji
Ph +679-450 382, fax +679-450 566.
Ship: W. de Vries Lentsch steel motor-sailor
Length: 40 metres Beam: 9 metres
Capacity: 18 guests in nine staterooms. Crew accommodation for 12
Bathrooms: Nine private toilets with ensuite baths
Dives per day: Four
Night Dives: Yes
Oxygen: Yes
Nearest hospital: Suva
Nearest Recompression Chamber: Suva