Photo shows Geoff blowing bubbles at Alacrity Rocks. See - no hands!

We are anchored in Nagara Bay at the top of Ono Island in the Astrolabe Lagoon. It's been blowing hard all night, and the boat has been bouncing around as the wind has swung around to the east from which direction this bay is more exposed to. The anchorages in Fiji are often very deep and here it is 24m. We have a nylon rope down together with a few metres of chain and our smaller anchor, as our ancient sick anchor winch is, well, sick and would probably suffer from a 12v D.C. heart attack if we asked it to haul full chain and anchor up from that depth. We would probably suffer a heart attack if we had to manually do it, too! The nylon warp and the anchor came from our first boat Corsair which we left in Port Moresby (PNG) in 1998. We used it all the time there for exactly the same reason and it's never failed us....yet!

We have been to the top of Ono and near its bottom too over the last few days. The first job, though, was to call in at Nagara Village and pay respects to the chief. He was busy doing village stuff, so we just paid respects to anyone we saw and deposited our offering of yaqona (kava) to an empty committee room. We are going in again tomorrow to check out the church solar panel system and help a villager figure out his. Fijians in their traditional villages have almost everything they need - plenty of land for growing healthy stuff, the sea and all its seafood at their doorstep, the bush and forest for buildings and always close-by family. The rub is that it's not easy to make money without abandoning it all and heading to the town to get a job.

Ono is mostly covered in thick scrub and pine trees which were planted back in the late 70s. There are footpaths through the bush between the island villages and to villagers' farm plots where they grow taro, breadfruit, tapioca (cassava) and anything else they can think of. One steep track winds its way up to one of the highest hills on the island, Qilia, which has a Vodafone tower perched on it, 360m up. It was quite a struggle finding the track and even more of a struggle getting to the top, but the views all around once we got there were fantastic. To the South we could see the length of Kadavu Island, to the north, Beqa and Viti Levu, while close at hand was the full stretch of the Astrolabe lagoons, the barrier reefs and scattering of islands.



View of the Astrolabe Lagoon from Qilia hill on Ono Island

Just to complement the climb we arranged for a dive with Ono based and Fijian managed Mai Dive to take us out to the network of bommies, pinnacles, caves and canyons around Alacrity Pass. The two dives turned out to be the best we've done (not that we've done enough to be expert judges!)with a very professional divemaster in charge. We swam through tunnels and caves and around huge underwater mountains. The photos we took mostly 15 - 20 m down seem to be a pale record of the underwater beauty. The colours are all removed, except blue!



Alison and Maika, the divemaster, heading into the blue.



Alison and Maika swimming through a canyon at Alacrity Rocks

There are manta rays that come close by to where we are anchored and several people we know have jumped into the water to swim with them but we haven't caught up with them yet!

We've been watching the parade of cyclones (hurricanes) in the Atlantic in awe. Another one is forming behind nasty Irma, the one that is battering the Northern Caribbean right now. Is it coincidence that an unprecedented row of severe storms develops in the first year of Donald Chump's presidency, climate change denier in chief?