Shortly after 7am we were off out of Fawn Harbour. As we made our left turn into the cut we put out two fishing lines and once out of the cut out out two more. The sea was flat and the westerly wind we’d had forecast was there, but it was just one knot. So we motored all the way to Viani Bay. We had one catch, a small Barracuda, just out of Fawn Harbour which we put back. Despite hearing that other boats caught Mahis we did not.<\/p>\n

Viani Bay is famous for it’s encircling reef – Rainbow Reef. Famous for it’s clear water making for excellent diving and snorkeling. As we approached we noticed Jackster exiting the reef so we hailed them. It turned out they had the Tahinas and Garimars aboard and were all off diving with the local guide, Jack Fisher. We asked if we could follow them to their first spot and upon consultation with Jack it was deemed ok.<\/p>\n

We were soon anchored on a shallow patch on the outside of the reef and then into the dinghy with our gear following the divers up the reef. We were in 20-100s+ feet of clear blue water with a health reef below us. We had the company of a lone white tipped reef shark and thousands of other fish. At one point we saw a turtle. We had intended to snorkel the reef so this lucky opportunity got us in and wet without having to sort out a guide.<\/p>\n

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Helen and I made the swim all the way back to the boat getting a little stung at the end by jelly fish larvae. A little irritating but ok once you know it calms down fairly quickly. Judy and Colin stayed near our dinghy allowing the current to take them down the reef.<\/p>\n

Back on the boat we headed into Viani Bay and anchored near Stray Kitty where we quickly readied lunch. We shared a bottle of wine with lunch setting the stage for a sleepy afternoon. Later in the afternoon our guests headed off in the kayak. It was funny seeing Judy doing all the paddling for a while while Colin messed with his fishing line. I would never get away with that with Helen.<\/p>\n

In the evening Helen cooked up another portion of the mahi we’d caught on the way to Fiji – quite delicious.<\/p>\n

Now that we’ve snorkeled the reef here we have the opportunity to press eastwards. We like the idea of reaching Matagi to the east of Taveuni and staying there a couple of nights before heading (and perhaps even sailing) back west to the tip of Taveuni and going for some hikes ashore.<\/p>\n

I’ve managed to upload four albums of photos for my regular readers a short trip back through the last few entries will reveal them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Shortly after 7am we were off out of Fawn Harbour. As we made our left turn into the cut we put out two fishing lines and once out of the cut out out two more. The sea was flat and the westerly wind we’d had forecast was there, but it was just one knot. So […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194,82,201,178],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fiji","category-jackster","category-stray-kitty","category-tahina","odd"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4672"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4674,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4672\/revisions\/4674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aboarddignity.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}