From Beachcomber, we headed towards the reef off of Mana Island. The reef is reputed to be one of the better dive spots in the area and we were anxious to give it a try even though finding and diving it sounded a bit challenging. On the way, we had yet another experience that confirmed charts of Fiji, especially our Navionics charts, aren’t to be trusted. The wind had been light nearly every day, so we’ve been doing a lot of motoring. While we were motoring toward Mana, I was busy filling our dive tanks and dishing up a plate of lunch. We were in the middle of a large region on the chart with no hazards marked, and I’d become a little lax about the constant watch for reefs I’d been keeping. When I came back up with a plate of food and looked around, we were headed straight for a large reef that was partially awash. The reef was probably a quarter mile across, awash with breakers, and nowhere to be seen on the chart. The next day I concluded that a mysteriously invisible island shown three quarters of a mile away on the chart was most likely meant to be the reef. Luckily our Maxsea and large-scale paper charts are a bit better. The dive shop at Musket Cove also gave us a color Google Earth printout with dive sites marked. That was actually more usefully than the Navionics charts as we were sailing in the Mamanucas.

The dive itself was a bit of adventure. There’s no mooring and it’s actually a drift dive due to the current. The dive starts off the corner of a fringing reef in an uncharted pass in the offshore reef. After visually finding what looked to be the pass, we jumped in and dropped down while Ash took the boat north of the reef to wait for us to surface. The reef below was pretty massive, and although we didn’t see quite the marine life that the dive shop was indicating we did cover a lot of ground and see quite a bit of coral and lots of smaller fish. It was a fairly challenging dive, but everyone did extremely well, and the compass navigation led us to our intended destination, the western tip of the reef, where we circled around to dive the drop-off on the north side of the reef and then surfaced in deeper water and signaled Ash to pick us up.

Navigating through the “supermarket”

Everything was going smoothly except for the time of day. It was already past 4pm, and the sun was getting too low in the sky to visually read the water depths. Our plan for the night was to anchor in deep water off of an uninhabited sand island with a fringing reef where we could possibly build a bonfire ashore. We made it to the island and were about to drop the anchor safely off of the southwest side of the small island when we noticed a skiff from a nearby resort that had been visiting the island seemed to be having engine trouble. We motored up and asked if they needed help. The operator said they were fine, so we asked for some anchoring advice on the island and he motioned us around the north edge of the reef and over to the east side of the island. The reef to the north extends quite a ways, and as we were passing the northern tip, we saw a mooring float in the water. I made the dumb decision to approach it as a decent mooring would have been better than a deep water anchorage. When we got to the mooring float, the water depth changed from over 80 feet to about 5 feet in an instant. I was about to call for reverse, but we’d already run near the mooring line and had to idle then engine in neutral to avoid fouling the propeller. The wind and current took only a few seconds to push us up onto the reef and we were aground. We started a second engine to provide more maneuverability, and I jumped in with scuba booties and a mask and snorkel to check thing out. The situation wasn’t good. The port keel was aground on the coral and the wind was off of the starboard beam, pushing us up onto the reef with only a little bit of daylight left. We weren’t hard aground, but it quickly became clear that getting off wasn’t going to be easy. Twisting the boat too much risked damaging the rudders and allowing us to drive farther up onto the reef, and reversing also risked damaging the rudders and just wasn’t working. It seemed like forever, but after 10-15 minutes or so of maneuvering and pushing with Ash at the wheel and me in the water, we finally managed to free ourselves and reverse out over the reef with the last bits of daylight disappearing. As I swam out with the boat, I could see the reef deepen to about 5 or 6 feet and then disappear as the keels slid out into 100 feet of water.

A quick swim around the bottom in deep water showed that the keels were scraped up, but not severely damaged. The port rudder, however, had been gouged by the coral and had a chunk missing at the forward bottom part of the rudder. The outer layer of glass had been chewed away and the wood core was exposed. I guess the good news is that the rudder body gave way instead of the rudder stock or part of the steering system, but it wasn’t the prettiest sight to see.

After a less than jovial dinner, I put on scuba gear and Ash held Colin’s dive light underwater on a pole while I tried to seal up the damaged area with underwater epoxy. The patch seems to be holding for now, but I’ll be pulling the rudder for repairs when we get back to the mainland. The rudder is too critical to not have it properly sealed.

After that incident, we’ve been even more careful about keeping a reef watch and only travelling when the sun is high enough in the sky to spot the reefs. Coming in too late in the evening was the real cause of our problems as we would have easily seen the extent of the reef at midday.