The Moorings boat charter company used to have a base in Fiji. They don’t anymore. For those of you who don’t know about bareboat chartering, basically the company rents out a boat without crew (thus bareboat) to individuals who have some, but varied boating skills. Why did they pull the plug on the operation and move the boats to other locations? They found that boats were ending up on reefs too often.

As many of you know, we have been cruising various locations over the last 4 years. For the most part navigating has been fairly simple. You look at the chart plotter and set your course accordingly. The Navionics charts we use have been accurate almost everywhere (one exception was a bay in Mexico).

What is different about Fiji? First the electronic charts (and for that matter the paper chart equivalents) are variable. Some areas are dead on and others out by as much as half a mile. It is somewhat disconcerting to see your boat on a chart plotter sailing over the land!! Secondly there are many more reefs here than I remember in other locations and the passes to get to the inside of the reefs seem a lot narrower. And thirdly the standard navigational aids such as marker buoys and navigational lights may or may not be present and may or may not be where the charts say they should be.

So how does one navigate in an area where so many have previously failed? We have learned a number of new and old techniques.

First the new. There is a very enterprising man in Savusavu named Curly who had been cruising here for a long time. He realized the need for accurate waypoints (GPS positions) that can be placed on a chart. The theory being that lines connected between Wwaypoints should take you over water not land! This allows one to plot a course through tight passages between reefs and avoid the coral. So Curly created a list of waypoints that he sells to cruisers, usually on their arrival to Savusavu. You realize that there is a leap of faith here as you are relying on the waypoint’s accuracy - usually to three decimal points for latitude and longitude. Then there is the possibility of transcription errors both at source and while putting them into the chart plotter… So far we have had no problems and Curly’s waypoints have be dead on. We have been warned about using waypoints off blog sites that have not been tested. I personally found one that put a waypoint for an anchorage the land!

One can also use a series of new internet navigational programs that use Google Maps and overlay the images on a navigation program (we use one called SeaIQ on our iPad). So just like a GPS in your car you can see your boat on a real Google Earth image rather than on a chart. We actually use a mixture of charts and images as the charts give us details like depth and navigational aids (when present) and the Google Maps satellite images show the actual locations of reefs and shallow water (dark blue is good and light blue to brown is generally bad!)

And lastly we go to the very old way of navigation. When going through passes or near reefs we always have one of us on the bow of the boat visually looking for shallows and reefs. We also use the visual technique for anchoring to try and avoid wrapping our chain around coral heads, but that’s another story.