For the most part, when I travel, I usually have a pretty good idea of what I expect to see when I arrive at my destination. Typically before I leave to go to a destination, I have looked at one or more photo sites to give me a sense of what I may be able to see, and shoot, when I get to the destination. Many times I have done some research on the accommodations that we will be staying at to make sure we don’t get an ugly surprise. It is rare that I am surprised, and even more rare that I am pleasantly surprised. I suppose based on all of the traveling I have done, I am spoiled and have very high expectations. And yet, a pleasant surprise is what we found in Taveuni at Paradise resort.
In five days of diving, I did 15 dives, 3 dives a day, and each of the sites we saw were different and I did not grow bored with the sites becoming too similar. Fiji is famous for being the soft coral capital of the world. Paradise Resort which has relatively quick access to rainbow reef is in my mind the epicenter of soft coral diving. Keep in mind, to be interesting there must be a pretty good current that runs through a dive site with soft coral to adequately feed the soft coral and keep them open and beautiful.
Most of our dives we did on slack high or slack low tide, so the current was not completely rippin’. After one of our dives one of our guides pointed out a place where the current was racing through near where we had been diving. The current looked to be well over 5 knots and if we had been there we would not have been there long!
If you want to be able to push a big camera through the current, be prepared to bring your big blade fins. I wore my dive rite fins and left most of the people on our trip behind. Split fins may be comfortable, but leave them for water that doesn’t move as much. And be prepared to be well fed at the resort. Big engines need lots of fuel!
Back at the resort there are opportunities to shoot macro shots, with nudibranchs and the house reef has resident blue ribbon eels and other macro subjects.
During the week, we saw sharks, but because there is no feeding of sharks in the area. The white tip sharks did not approach our group and were content to sleep just off the wall in water too deep to dive. We also saw two enormous Napoleon wrasses that each would have weighed well over 300 pounds. We saw several dozen pilot whales on our way to several of the dive sites and a pod of dolphins as well. Sure it would have been interesting to get closer to them than 20 meters while on the surface, but I was quite content to be able to observe them from afar. So when will I go back to Paradise Resort, as soon as I can find space in my schedule. I will plan on spending at least two weeks there next time.
