Nai'a Liveaboard
The Nai'a was an unusual trip for me in that I went alone. Being a lone traveler was a bit different because you don't have that go to person on the boat or underwater. It tends to amplify the importance of the details.
First, getting there is great. It is the easiest place to get to of the far away spots outside of the Caribbean. An overnight from LA and you are in Nadi and a 1 hour drive and you are ready for the boat. I stayed one night at a Nadi hotel to catch my breath and ended up meeting half of my future boat mates.
The boat is most luxurious that I have been on, even compared to the Indonesian boats which are bigger, but in a more casual way. The owners make sure that you feel like royalty when you step on board. When the boat was first built, the owners created a deal where each return visit would get a slightly larger discount. They were more successful that they had hoped and ended up with a lot of very regular repeat visitors. I was one of only 2 or 3 out of 18 that had not been on the boat before.
The food is the best you can get on a liveaboard dive boat. They have chefs come in and design a 2 week menu that rotates for each night. White table clothes and fine place settings. Meals are a big focus of the week.
The water temps in Fiji vary quite a bit through the year. I was there in early November and the water was a bit cool, especially towards the end of the week after 20 or so dives. If you go in our summer, the water can be very cold while Feb and March are very warm. Be prepared.
We divided up into two groups for the week and the dive operation was very hands off once they were comfortable with your skills. I passed their muster and was left to kind of do my own thing with my camera. Because I didn't have a dive buddy, I was almost too alone at times. The good thing was that water visibility was always very high and we could see a long ways. We were also left to dive as long as our air and computers would take care of us.
The camera facilities were more limited than what is now current standard. I would not be surprised if they have updated their UW photography benches. Equipment has gotten a lot mroe common and bulky over the past few years.
The diving is very good from start to end. The Namena marine reserve has a half dozen world class sites. I dove there from the Cousteau Resort a few years earlier, but it was a long ways removed from the hotel and boat only went there twice a week, wind willing.
Chimneys is a pair of volcanic pinnacles which are really nice with schools of fish from the bottom at about 100 feet all the way to the surface. All of the reef tops in Fiji are full of colorful hard coral garden and the Chimneys were beautiful. Kansas is another amazing dive with fields of beige soft coral flowing in the current to make it look like, well Kansas. North Save-A-Tack is also an incredible dive in the right conditions. Schools of fish and a handful of sharks were everywhere.
Nigali Passage has to be one of the best dive sites in the world. Very similar to Ulong Island in Palau. It is a mile long channel between two bodies of water and at the right current conditions it fills with the entire food chain from the eaten to the eaters. A dozen sharks, 50 or so big groupers , and schools of bait for the big guys. They set up like a wall of feeders and you just watch the action happen. It is almost worth the trip for that dive alone.
Also spectacular is E6 which is a bit pinnacle out in the blue. While some divers said that this site has been hurt by El Nino is the late 1990s, it seemed pretty amazing to me.
Fiji did lack the huge variety of places like Solomons and Indonesia to the immediate west. We did not see the exotic creatures that one sees there.
One other side note, I did befriend an elderly woman diver who had logged 12,000 dives in her career and she was retiring after she left the boat. She was most famous for being the blonde on Sea Hunter who always needed to be rescued by Beau Bridges. She had many stories to tell about the creation of the dive industry over the 1980s and 1990s. For an avid diver, her stories were great. And she still kept up with the group!
