Download PDF - Oyster News 66 - Oyster Yachts

But at Musket Cove, owner Dick Smith
offers his entire resort including restaurant
and swimming pool to all transient sea
going bums. Dick knows the needs of a
seaman and provides his blue water
visitors with their own island affectionately
called Dick’s Island. He has furnished it
with picnic tables, wood burning
barbecues and a thatched roofed outdoor
bar known as the 3 Dollar bar, (which by
the time we had returned from Toronto
was the 4 Dollar bar), and every evening
when sailors get together for a sundowner
and cook out, many of the inquisitive
resort guests join the scruffy lot for some
down to earth seafaring talk and a good
drink to boot.
The bar celebrates Sunday night as
‘mates night off’, and offers pre-cooked
baked potatoes, pasta and green salads at
a reasonable price to accompany whatever
you are flaming over the barbecue.
Every night the resort supplies the dinner
ware, napkins, and condiments to use at
the picnic tables. It seems too good to be
true. God Bless owner Dick Smith who
once was a sailor.
With lit torches and beating of the Lali
drums the regatta festivities began. Pirates
Day initiated a boat race to Beachcomber
Island; the rules of the race – get there
any way you can! Participating boats
soon found themselves in friendly battle
hurling water balloons, tomatoes, and
biodegradable toilet tissue.
Hobby Cat races, barbecues, dress your
boat day, dress your man for drag night,
and a pig on the spit feast were all part of
the finale. It was all great fun and when it
was over, we left on a high morning tide
and ventured into the Yasawa islands.
The Yasawas’ are a long chain of islands
and islets, some so close together you can
wade from one to the other, all stretching
80 km into the yonder blue waters of the
Pacific. Many are uninhabited. Rimmed
with craggy coastlines, bare rocky
pinnacles poke skyward through dark lime
green foliage. Virgin beaches support
numerous bays, inlets and lagoons, some
offering good holding for an anchor.
An ocean roll from the north can make the
small bays lumpy and if dropping a lunch
hook is the plan, arriving early to leave
early is a good idea as the more protected
bays are far and few between.
With few real navigational aids, the
occasional bare stick leave the helmsman
to ponder which side of the post the hull
crushing coral is located. Many of the
sticks have been blown off course leaving
the dangerous zones naked and now
unjustly mark the safe ones and there
were times when steering towards the
visible whiteness of breaking waves then
turning the boat towards the next foamy
breaker was the only way to discover a
passage through it all. Our fear was to get
into the middle of a coral maze and not
find our way out so we often used the
chart plotters trail marker to visualize
where we had come from, causing the
computer screen to look more like a plate
of spaghetti than an aid. It became
important for us to travel when the sun
was at its highest in order for one of us to
be stationed on the bow pointing out the
water covered obstructions. Sometimes my
arms would be flailing like I was dancing
to the YMCA.
The 16-20 volcanic Yasawas’ lie 20 km off
the north west of Viti Levu and are a back
packer’s haven serviced by a catamaran
called the Yasawa Flyer that whisks casual
tourists to laid back resorts, some run by
local fishing and farming families. The low
cost resorts provide dormitory facilities,
communal meals, outdoor plumbing, and
drinkable rain water. Limited electricity
demands the resorts keep in touch with
other islands by radio and light disappears
with the setting sun. It is a natural haven
where coconuts fall out of trees daily, you
can easily find a precious beach and the
sparkle of the night sky persuades you to
believe there are no worries in the world.
It is a place where just by being there is an
euphoric experience.
The miniature islands of Vanua Levu and
Navadra are separated only by a narrow
passage of water forming a small bay
between them. They say you can always
expect at least a little roll in this cove but
once there, are committed for the night
because the distance to the next sheltered
island is not reachable by sundown.
We were the only boat in the inlet and
chose a spot in deep water to drop
anchor so as to avoid the abundant soft
corals flourishing in an unspoiled undersea
garden stretching from shore to
camouflaged reef mid bay. The clarity of
the water was like a brand new piece of >
LEFT: Musket Cove
FAR MIDDLE: A mooring in Suva Suva
FAR RIGHT: The annual regatta ceremony
ABOVE: Baccalieu anchored off Dick’s Island
OWNER REPORT
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