July 23, 2013 Tuesday
Meandering all over the arc of the anchor and hearing the anchor chain grating on the short coral is nerve wracking! Magogai Bay is quite deep and I had 210' of anchor chain in 56' of water depth. With williwaws boxing the compass and intermittent periods of calm, two nights were enough in this lovely place. We heaved up anchor at 0930 hrs on July 23rd and sailed over to Koro (17-16.5' s; 179-21.6 E) which is about 32 nm bearing 068 T deg. from Makogai. I decided to go out the NE pass (Daveta Loboni) for which I had Way Points but the chart was inaccurate and need an offset. There is a new navigation technique developed and being used by yachties which incorporates Google Earth views which are placed over an existing area of a chart and then a "transparency" can be created on top of the chart and the offset can be seen and corrected. The GE2KAP program then allows the navigator to slide the chart to the Google Earth view and "voila" the offset and correct chart view are there. All this doesn't mean much to most of you but it's brilliant to a navigator! I'm always impressed with the amount of savvy, knowledge and computer programming skills that are out here amongst the yachties. The end result of all this was that we navigated through the reef system flawlessly.
Dere Bay (17-16.5' S; 179-21.6' E) in Koro has four strong mooring balls that are available to visiting yachts. This makes it easy for a yacht to pick one of these up instead of anchoring. The moorings are anchored to the seabed with special helix anchors which provide a safe anchoring system for the yacht. The only thing required of the yacht is to pick up a floating line attached to a mooring ball and make it fast to the bow cleats on the yacht. After that the yacht swings with the wind direction.
Koro is a rather strange place. It appears that there was a frenzy of building and marketing with the selling of lots to Americans, Kiwis and Ozzies. The Dere Bay Resort was built and, due to the extensive reef system, has the longest pier in Fiji to get out to deeper water. The Resort seems to have all the amenities vacationing landlubbers and property owners demand but there just aren't many people around. The Resort was only open during the evenings and if a meal was wanted it had to be ordered a day in advance. The island seems to be eco-conscious and an American reality show was filmed in one of the bungalows that was built for the filming. Later there was feuding and law suits from all the participants over property rights and ownership. Today, the bungalow is abandoned and in shambles with no one able to buy or sell the property: a lawyer's orgasm!
We have been travelling in the same direction with another boat "Catharpin Blue" since Suva. It's an Island Packet 420 and lovely she is. Anyway, we signed up a day in advance for the evening meal and met an American ophthalmologist and his partner. They were sporting a bottle of Patron Tequila and generous is sharing. Patron encourages speech and stimulates the imagination even if the senses are dulled. A good time was had by all.
We managed to get over to the local school and donate a box of books that were picked up in Opua, NZ for remote schools in the islands. The headmaster was an interesting Fijian who had a progressive outlook on getting his brightest students into higher education. Unfortunately, the school only had one computer for all the grades. I'm not seeing much of a trickle down effect from the Resort or those big homes on the hill that drink "sun-downers" every evening and ogle the Sun. Be that as it may, every Fijian has a million dollar smile and a personality to go with it. Absolutely a fascinating and beautiful country!
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