GreggS
Contributor
My wife and I were in Fiji at Beqa Lagoon Resort September 22-29. We had a really good time while there and the diving was great. It took all week to convince my wife to do the shark dive, but with the help of some other divers, she finally agreed to go and she is now so glad she did.
The accommodations were really nice and the food was quite tasty. The Kava was...interesting. I happened to be selected as the tribal chief at the kava ceremony and I had to be the first to drink it. I think one lady described the taste perfectly when she said it tasted like unwashed raw potatoes.
As for diving, although it is spring time there, water temps were in the mid to upper 70s. We did fine with just 3mm wetsuits. And of course, the shark dive was the highlight of the week and I'm glad we waited until our last day to do it. The rest of the week we dove on reefs which were quite colorful and had a tremendous amount of sea life on them. On Wednesday of that week, every other diver did the shark dive and since my wife had not yet agreed to do it, she and I were the only divers on the reef boat. I asked one of the DMs if there were any close by wrecks and he said there were, so on our first dive that day we dove a Japanese trawler sitting in 100 fsw right next to a very large coral head. We say a large variety of fish and other sea life including white tip sharks, sea turtles (one of them was huge, about 4 feet overall length), and garden eels. The turtle in the photo with my wife is not the large one. It was an average sized one that swam towards her and I was able to take the picture. Since this was basically a private guided tour, it was the best diving we did all week other than the shark dive.
One of the videos I have attached is on a different Japanese trawler that we dove on Thursday. One thing I want to point out in this video is at the end. There was an Australian lady at the resort that week that was paraplegic. She was a diver and was there by herself. You will see her at the end of that video. She was even on the shark dives on Wednesday as well as the one we did on Friday. My wife and I got to know her while there and I really admired her determination in not allowing a handicap to stop her from doing something she really enjoyed.
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The accommodations were really nice and the food was quite tasty. The Kava was...interesting. I happened to be selected as the tribal chief at the kava ceremony and I had to be the first to drink it. I think one lady described the taste perfectly when she said it tasted like unwashed raw potatoes.
As for diving, although it is spring time there, water temps were in the mid to upper 70s. We did fine with just 3mm wetsuits. And of course, the shark dive was the highlight of the week and I'm glad we waited until our last day to do it. The rest of the week we dove on reefs which were quite colorful and had a tremendous amount of sea life on them. On Wednesday of that week, every other diver did the shark dive and since my wife had not yet agreed to do it, she and I were the only divers on the reef boat. I asked one of the DMs if there were any close by wrecks and he said there were, so on our first dive that day we dove a Japanese trawler sitting in 100 fsw right next to a very large coral head. We say a large variety of fish and other sea life including white tip sharks, sea turtles (one of them was huge, about 4 feet overall length), and garden eels. The turtle in the photo with my wife is not the large one. It was an average sized one that swam towards her and I was able to take the picture. Since this was basically a private guided tour, it was the best diving we did all week other than the shark dive.
One of the videos I have attached is on a different Japanese trawler that we dove on Thursday. One thing I want to point out in this video is at the end. There was an Australian lady at the resort that week that was paraplegic. She was a diver and was there by herself. You will see her at the end of that video. She was even on the shark dives on Wednesday as well as the one we did on Friday. My wife and I got to know her while there and I really admired her determination in not allowing a handicap to stop her from doing something she really enjoyed.
Being a single diver, I spent a lot of time with the crew of the Nai'a last liveaboard trip.
