We had a fast overnight passage to Suva, close reaching in 20-25 kts wind and arriving off the harbor pass just after dawn. This is a busy harbor, so it was pretty straight forward to simply fall into queue and follow the line of ship traffic into the harbor. Once inside we peeled off and made for a little anchorage known locally as Tradewind Bay where we'd heard there were mooring balls maintained by the local chandlry owner for the use of cruisers. This proved to be true and a quick call to Tradewind Marine to secure permission was all that was required to obtain a very nice mooring free of charge for our stay. One of the downsides of this location was landing the dinghy at a dilapidated Police dock which was infested with coral sea snakes. In fact Wendy came within about a foot of tying the dinghy painter to one (see pic). The other drawback was that we needed a $5 (USD) taxi ride to get into the city. But we'd also heard a few negatives about the city front anchorage, so we felt pretty good about staying in Tradewinds Bay.

Suva is the biggest city in Fiji. They have lots of local shops and 3 large shopping malls all in the same number of blocks. There is also a very large produce market with many tourist shops and of course the requisite McDonalds. While Suva is foremost a major commercial port, they also host large cruise ships from time to time and we had a chance to see the waterfront transform itself when a cruise ship hits the wharf. All hands on deck to fleece the tourists. It was amusing to see how differently we were treated after the ship left and we were still there. We could suddenly get much better prices on everything for one thing, but the people also seemed to warm up quite a bit and become curious about our story. In fact, it seemed that nearly every cab we got into would end up inviting us home for dinner and to meet the family.

So we wandered around, did a little shopping, sampled a few restaurants and enjoyed some down time. One of the restaurants we tried was in the renovated Governor's Mansion which was quite nice. We also visited the Fiji National museum which had a great selection of artifacts including numerous carving examples, some nice ocean voyaging canoes and the actual rudder from the HMS Bounty, which had been brought in from Pictairn island. In between these activities we caught up on some of the current movies at the local Cineplex. Since admission was less than $3 (USD), we didn't feel too bad seeing several movies here.

We ended up staying in Suva for 5 days, then with the next weather window we set sail at the crack of dawn for Kandavu and the great Astrolabe reef about 40 miles due south.