Back from Fiji...

[schultz]

Garden Island Resort’s rooms are simple, yet they have to have some of the quietest air conditioners I’ve ever heard, making sleeping at night very restful. Although after ten hour flight from Los Angeles, I think I could have fallen asleep at a rock concert. The gardens around the resort are very beautiful and provide the fresh flowers you have every day in your room and at the dinner table. The food is spectacular, the staff very friendly, to the point where and at times you feel like royalty. There are also several hikes you can take in the surrounding area – but be wary with some of the tropical rains since they can produce flash floods when near some of the streams and waterfalls.

On our first day of diving we had a nice laid-back breakfast and afterwards we headed over to the dive shop to climb aboard our dive boat for the day. Garden Island Resort and Aqua Trek have teamed together to cater to the diving community in a manner that gives you a memorable, pleasurable, and relaxing vacation. Aqua Trek’s staff members are friendly, knowledgeable, and have some of the best divemasters we’ve seen in recent memory. They like to have fun, which makes for a better dive for vacationers while at the same time ensuring diver safety at all times. The dive shop is simple, yet well laid out, allowing ample drying racks inside for all your equipment. They also have great compressor facilities and provide nitrox fills at a standard mix of 32 percent.

As divers that are used to hauling our own equipment, we truly felt spoiled by Aqua Trek’s staff as they would carry all your equipment to and from the dive boat, thoroughly rinse your dive equipment at the end of the day, and hang it up in their locked shop at night to have it all ready for you the next morning. As far as safety is concerned this shop has one of the best operations we’ve seen in a long time. After every dive, they do a roll call, while recording your depth and time on a chart that they file in their shop. At the end of every day, you must sign off on your dives. As with any reputable dive shop, Nitrox fills are analyzed, logged, and signed-off before you even leave the shore.

The dive sites are spectacular, with many healthy corals, ample fish life, and many other critters. Currents at the White Wall can be strong, so newer divers should watch their air consumption. Divemasters here seem to respect the coral and aquatic life a great deal being certain not to disturb their surroundings with their group as much as possible. That being said, they still manage to find things in the coral heads that will simply amaze you. Surface intervals are always on a beach where you can spend the time eating a snack either on the beach or in the shade of trees, or snorkeling in the shallows where lionfish, octopus, and eels can be found in as little as six feet of water. Night dives are offered, but they require a minimum of four divers and 24 hours notice to the staff.

We did a total of 13 dives at this resort – Fish Factory, Rainbow’s End, Blue Ribbon Eel Reef, Annie’s Bommie, The Ledge (night dive), White Wall (twice), Baracude Reef, Port Luck, Coral Garen, Jack’s Place, The Zoo, and Corner and Point. I could go into detail on each of these reefs, but there is simply too much information to relay in what we saw at these sites. It is sufficient to say that each reef we visited was a little different from the next, each having its marvelous features, and each making a memorable dive. Locations you shouldn’t miss however would be Annie’s Bommie, White Wall, and Jack’s Place.

Our first dive was at Fish Factory, and no small wonder on the name here, since in the first five minutes of the dive we encountered two things on our checklist of must-see fish. The first was the Blue Ribbon Eel. Second was the Lion Fish, which was conveniently located two feet from the eel. Aside from these two specimens, this reef and all others we visited were in no small words TEEMING with schools of every fish imaginable. Take your best dive in the Caribbean scoop up all those fish, multiply by twenty, and then you begin to approach the levels we saw. No question about it, we were swimming in a huge fish bowl.

By our third day of diving, we had both gotten used to converting our depths into meters. Having everyone report his or her profiles in this manner makes it easier for the dive crew on the boat to keep track of everyone. They carefully log every dive, and then at the end of the day, divers must sign off on their profiles. Using the metric system is also much easier when determining maximum operating depths (MOD) on Nitrox fills. Here they tend to run a 32 percent blend which extends one’s bottom time by as much as 10 minutes on the deeper wall dives.

Day three gave us an opportunity to meet some Europeans that could actually boast a longer flight schedule than ours – over 35 hours! Three of them are Spaniards from Madrid, while the other is from the Czech Republic, but who has been living in Los Angeles for the past few years. All were fun to hang around with and they were really good divers as well as phenomenal videographers and photographers. Thankfully we would all share photos and video at the end of the dives, and I actually received many pointers from two of them that I later found out are actually professional underwater photographers.

We shared our travel stories over our nightly viewings, beer and wine. In no small words, getting to Fiji from anywhere but New Zealand is not easy, and not exactly the cheapest thing to do for a vacation. Like our newfound friends, our package at this resort had only included five days of two-tank diving and we wanted more. We all thought it might be a while before we returned to this part of the world, so we might as well make the most of it and cough up some addition money for a sixth day of diving. Our last two sites at this resort would be the Zoo, followed by Corner and Point.

The Zoo is supposed to be THE big animal encounter place for this region of Rainbow Reef, with its massive wall and great depths but when we were under the water, nothing came out of the deep blue. Disappointed, we did an hour-long surface interval and then motored to Corner and Point. This was mainly a drift dive, but the last 15 minutes we spent looking at two white tips feeding off the scraps of what appeared to be a blacktip shark – and a big one at that. This blacktip was hunting in the coral heads and continued to circle back to one specific location where it would lunge headfirst into an opening and thrash widely about trying to feed on something. Most people stayed clear of the shark, but I decided to take a closer look.

The shark was not deterred by the presence of my fellow divers nor my loud bubbles as they blew away from my regulator. In fact the shark gradually swam closer and closer to me as it continued its figure-eight stalking mode. Typically, most reef sharks are timid and tend to shy away when divers approach. This one was different, and seemed to want to take a closer look at anything within its current hunting area. Using the shark’s interest in me, I positioned myself with my back to a coral head, and camera out in front. This stance had come in handy in the past when a shark came a little too close to me and I used the camera to nudge it out of my way.

I was convinced it was a blacktip even with this somewhat abnormal behavior and no matter how hard I tried, I could not seem to get a decent photo of the animal, frustrated, I swam away. It wasn’t until Melissa and I compared photos after the dive with some identification charts when we realized that this wasn’t a blacktip, but rather a very large (easily 8 feet), and very dangerous Lemon shark. My only misgiving about the experience was that I failed to get the entire animal into frame since it instantly turned away whenever my pre-flash on my camera lit up. Looks like I’ll have to invest in some more camera equipment and invest in some sync-cords!

With our diving day done, and a memorable big animal encounter to boot, we spent the rest of the afternoon packing. The next day would be another travel day, and another resort in the diving paradise that is Fiji.