Mana

While we’ve been here in Fiji I’ve settled on looking at three sets of information for my weather forecasts. The first is a synoptic picture, something very much like the picture that is shown by weathermen on the TV showing where all the highs, lows, fronts and cloud/rainfall are. This gives a very useful overview. Coupled with the knowledge that the jet stream, generally, pushes the weather systems from west to east this gives a nice overview and a good idea of what’s coming down the line over the next few days. This is produced each day by the Fiji Met Service. Prettier versions of the same chart can be found here but these are larger in size (bytewise) and I want to have both consistency and the ability to download over the sideband radio. So I go with the b/w hand drawn images.

The next view on the weather is the Fiji Marine forecast coupled with the corresponding general weather bulletin. These are a textual summary of the weather for the area covering the current and following day. They are, at best, grossly summarized and one has to adjust the timing of events based on where we are in Fiji. For instance, if the summary calls for a wind change later in the day, this probably means in the morning in the Yasawas (west side) and probably tomorrow in the Lau (east side).

Finally there are the good old gribs from the US meteorologists. This is wind/pressure/wave height data from a computer simulation that runs every 6 hours. When requesting the data one can choose quite a few parameters. Right now I download just the Fiji area over 5 days at 6 hourly intervals.

Sometimes these predictive sources agree, sometimes they don’t. Yesterday was one of the dont’s. The text forecasts were the recognizable boiler plate outputs for light trades. Basically they said to expect 10-15 knot winds from the SE all over Fiji for the weekend. The synoptic picture placed us in a high pressure ridge with widely spaced isobars with two lows to the south of us and one far to the north. This would suggest a couple of listless days with light winds from variable directions. The grib files showed something similar.

Sometimes the text forecasts get the upper hand on the others as (and I’m guessing here) there is some interpretation involved and local knowledge applied. However, I decided this time the more likely explanation was a combination of it being the weekend and Fiji winning their rugby match the day before contributed to no interpretation at all and we simply got the erroneous boilerplate trade forecast.

So as we left our anchorage just before 8am our expectation was for a hot and muggy motor to our next destination. I didn’t even bother to under the sail bag. And that’s exactly what we got. The seas were flat and the wind never rose above 4 knots. As anticipated it changed direction a bit but mostly came from the north, behind us, giving us very little apparent wind in the cockpit. We took a slight detour around Kuata Island as I understood there were some interesting rock formations to be seen. And there were.

Our destination was Mana, an island with a lagoon to the south accessible by a twisting, narrow pass. On the way there I looked at the passage with Google Earth and plotted a path through the snaking pass, converted it and transferred it to our chart plotter for reference. When we got there the pass turned out to be very well marked and even though we’d arrived just on low tide (on a full moon as well) navigating the pass was straight forward. As we only expected to stay one night we dropped the anchor near the pass only to be told by a passing dive boat we’d be in the way of the cat ferry that comes in and out several times each day. So we moved further north and nearer to the resorts on the island.

As it was lunchtime we quickly dropped the dinghy and headed ashore tying the dinghy to the far side of the platform at the base of the extended dock. There is a huge (in terms of area) resort here called the Mana Island Resort with a tiny Backpackers next door. We visited the Backpackers first and had lunch there. We ordered a beer each and ended up with the larger (two bottle equivalent) bottles. We then wondered around the main resort to get a feel for what it was like so we can decide, with our friends, if this is somewhere they want to come. Perhaps due to the beer on leaving the north side of the island/resort we found ourselves back there which confused us for a while.

We did eventually find ourselves back on the boat. The reef is supposed to be good here for snorkeling but the beer and my unwellness was catching up on me and Helen wasn’t feeling too brilliant so we just rested the rest of the afternoon.

Today we will move on. We have the same incongruent mix of forecasts this morning. There is no wind to speak of at the moment but tomorrow the easterlies look as though they may just pick up so we want to press closer to the mainlaind. Whatever stop we make we want to stay for two nights before heading to Denarau on Wednesday.