Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Fiji: Day 22 - Double Rainbow

Monday, August 19, 2013

When the sun finally came up, we were all tired as hell and tried entering Elizabeth Cove, just to the west of Albert Cove. We were rendered speechless as the most vibrant full rainbow I have ever seen came into view. 
You can even see a double rainbow forming outside it.

Fiji is known to be extremely dangerous for sailors as there are unmarked reefs everywhere and most charts are off (by up to a few miles sometimes). So you must always be on the alert when travelling whether near land or not. Local knowledge is invaluable here. We tried to enter Elizabeth Cove using only our chart plotter and a paper chart for navigation and almost ran aground on reefs multiple times (according to our depth sounder). We ran away after failing to enter the cove and looked at our depth transducer to find a bit of barnacle build up. This MAY have explained the uncharted shallows.

We contacted 'Jim' (a well known local who speaks on Rag of the Air often) on the SSB to get some local knowledge on the area. He suggested we try Albert Cove instead.

On entering Albert cove, using some waypoints we got from some passing sailor over the VHF, we were able to squeeze through the narrow reef channel and securely drop anchor on our first attempt.

We are just resting today as no one really got any sleep last night.

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