This morning we pulled up our anchor and headed over to Beqa Island proper, into a beautiful protected bay surrounded on three sides by steep, heavily forested hills. This was an extremely comfortable anchorage – no rolling about in the waves while we try to sleep at night as the water is so protected that it is nearly glass calm.

The village here was the friendliest yet and we became friends with some of the inhabitants. Following our sevusevu (no kava this time), Anouk went off to the gardens to purchase some fresh produce and Rod was checking out a fishing boat motor that wasn’t running. An older woman snagged me and invited me into her home where she served tea and a freshly baked flat cake (looked like a tortilla but slightly thicker and sweeter). We soon had a regular coffee klatsch session as she and a couple of her daughters and a collection of grandchildren all entertained Anouk and me both. By the time we left, our hostess had arranged for us to return in the afternoon for a Meke – a traditional Fijian dance performance – and requested if possible that we videotape the performance and make a DVD of it for the village, which did own one community TV and DVD player kept in the chief’s home.

So Mike and I returned at four in the afternoon with Rod and Anouk begging off as they had seen more than their share of Mekes over the years. As soon as we set foot ashore we were met with villagers anxious to guide us to the chief’s home where the performance would take place. We met two Australian ladies who also joined the audience – they were actually doing a homestay in the village proper, arranged by their travel agency back in Australia. We were presented with fresh flower leis and seated on big comfortable plush sofas lined up along one wall. What appeared to be the entire population of the village (except for many of the men who were off on an extended fishing trip) were crowded into the room and seated on a big woven reed mat that covered the entire floor.

The performance was lively and lots of fun – with singing, dancing, a comedy routine (which caused great hilarity among the Fijians who could understand the words!) and a kava ceremony. I videotaped the entire thing non-stop except when invited to join in on the dancing which happened several times later in the performance. We did make several DVDs on the iMac aboard Raven and can only cross our fingers that the disks will play on the village’s old machine.

At this stopover, Anouk cleaned house and was determined to discard several unneeded and unwanted items taking up our limited space on the boat, so she gathered together a bag of stuff and presented it to the chief’s wife as a gift. However her plan backfired, as the chief’s wife immediately scurried around collecting gifts she could offer us in exchange and Anouk returned to Raven with a bag equally full of unwanted (but different!) items.

Between our morning and evening village visits we took the dinghy around the corner of the bay to Marlin Bay Resort to check out the facilities. The resort specializes in diving holidays and owns two or three dive boats. We decided it was worth our while to sign up in order to take advantage of local knowledge and the ability to reach areas out of the scope of accessibility for both Raven and/or the dinghy. Accordingly early Thursday morning we hauled all our gear over in the dinghy and loaded it aboard one of the dive boats. There was a large group from Houston that had been at the resort nearly all week, and they were soon aboard with us and we struck off for two dive sites called Seven Sisters and Soft Coral Plateau.

We enjoyed the change – and because we didn’t require one of our Raven group to stand guard and man the dinghy for the rest of us as per our normal procedure, for the first time all four of us were able to dive together. However the disadvantage of a group dive like this is that it really seemed like a swarm of locusts as the 15-20 divers descended en masse on the reef, cameras in hand (they ALL had cameras). But the Fijian guides were excellent and made the trip worthwhile. They specifically pointed out a blue ribbon eel to me as I had show interest and I got some great video of this small eel which is bright electric blue with yellow trim. We got a demonstration of “magic coral” which changes color instantly at the lightest touch of a finger and Anouk found and videotaped an octopus doing an impersonation of a rock. In addition the soft coral was abundant and very beautiful and the small colorful reef fish were present in the thousands.

The dive boat trip lasted until two or so in the afternoon, with two separate tank dives and an hour’s rest/decompression time between. Back at Raven, we pretty well crashed for the rest of the day, until it was time to return to the resort for an evening out at the nice restaurant at the water’s edge. Then it was early to bed because we had all determined we just couldn’t miss the Shark Dive scheduled for Friday!

To be continued;-)